The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with sequences of either syllables in Mandarin Chinese or harmonic sounds, both comprising deviants in pitch contour, duration and Voice Onset Time (VOT) or equivalent that were either far from (Large deviants) or close to (Small deviants) the standard. For both Mandarin syllables and harmonic sounds, results were clear-cut in showing larger MMNs to pitch contour deviants in musicians than in visual artists. Results were less clear for duration and VOT deviants, possibly because of the specific characteristics of the stimuli. Results are interpreted as reflecting similar processing of pitch contour in speech and non-speech sounds. The implications of these results for understanding the influence of intense musical training from childhood to adulthood and of genetic predispositions for music on foreign language perception are discussed.

Full Text Available The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN design with sequences of either syllables in Mandarin Chinese or harmonic sounds, both comprising deviants in pitch contour, duration and Voice Onset Time (VOT or equivalent that were either far from (Large deviants or close to (Small deviants the standard. For both Mandarin syllables and harmonic sounds, results were clear-cut in showing larger MMNs to pitch contour deviants in musicians than in visual artists. Results were less clear for duration and VOT deviants, possibly because of the specific characteristics of the stimuli. Results are interpreted as reflecting similar processing of pitch contour in speech and non-speech sounds. The implications of these results for understanding the influence of intense musical training from childhood to adulthood and of genetic predispositions for music on foreign language perception is discussed.

Full Text Available This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. However, the amplitude of the N400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment, suggesting the use of a higher level, lexical mechanism. Furthermore, during native speech comprehension, semantic violations in the critical words elicited an N400 effect followed by a late positivity. During foreign-accented speech comprehension, semantic violations only elicited an N400 effect. Overall, our results suggest that, despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination, native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. Moreover, these results suggest that lexical access, semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors, such as the accent of the speaker.

Understanding speech usually seems easy, but it can become noticeably harder when the speaker has a foreign accent. This is because foreign accents add considerable variation to speech. Research on foreign-accented speech shows that participants are able to adapt quickly to this type of variation.

Full Text Available Foreign-accented speech often presents a challenging listening condition. In addition to deviations from the target speech norms related to the inexperience of the nonnative speaker, listener characteristics may play a role in determining intelligibility levels. We have previously shown that an implicit visual bias for associating East Asian faces and foreignness predicts the listeners’ perceptual ability to process Korean-accented English audiovisual speech (Yi et al., 2013. Here, we examine the neural mechanism underlying the influence of listener bias to foreign faces on speech perception. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI study, native English speakers listened to native- and Korean-accented English sentences, with or without faces. The participants’ Asian-foreign association was measured using an implicit association test (IAT, conducted outside the scanner. We found that foreign-accented speech evoked greater activity in the bilateral primary auditory cortices and the inferior frontal gyri, potentially reflecting greater computational demand. Higher IAT scores, indicating greater bias, were associated with increased BOLD response to foreign-accented speech with faces in the primary auditory cortex, the early node for spectrotemporal analysis. We conclude the following: (1 foreign-accented speech perception places greater demand on the neural systems underlying speech perception; (2 face of the talker can exaggerate the perceived foreignness of foreign-accented speech; (3 implicit Asian-foreign association is associated with decreased neural efficiency in early spectrotemporal processing.

Naturally produced English clear speech has been shown to be more intelligible than English conversational speech. However, little is known about the extent of the clear speech effects in the production of nonnative English, and perception of foreign-accented English by younger and older listeners. The present study examined whether Cantonese speakers would employ the same strategies as those used by native English speakers in producing clear speech in their second language. Also, the clear s...

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurogenic disorder characterized by altered speech that sounds foreign-accented. This study presents a British subject perceived to speak with an Italian (or Greek) accent after a brainstem (pontine) stroke. Native English listeners rated the strength of foreign accent and impairment they perceived in…

This study examined how English learners in second-language (SL) and foreign-language (FL) contexts employ tense backshifting in indirect reported speech. Participants included 35 international students in the United States, 37 Bulgarian speakers of English, 38 Bosnian speakers of English, and 41 native English speakers. The instrument involved…

Full Text Available Investigations into the use of private speech by adult English foreign language (EFL learners in regulating their mental activities have been an interesting area of research with a sociocultural framework. Following this line of research, 30 advanced adult EFL learners were selected via the administration of Oxford quick placement test and took a test of solving challenging English riddles while their voices were being recorded. Later, instances of the produced private speech were analyzed in terms of form, content, and function. It was demonstrated that private speech with its different forms, contents, and functions plays a very crucial role in cognitive regulation of EFL learners which has important implications for the context of language learning classrooms. In addition, participants seemed to produce qualitatively different kinds of L2 private speech, which brought us to the conclusion that it would be necessary to consider quality and not just quantity in studying psycholinguistic concepts, such as cognitive regulation and private speech.

Investigations into the use of private speech by adult English foreign language (EFL) learners in regulating their mental activities have been an interesting area of research with a sociocultural framework. Following this line of research, 30 advanced adult EFL learners were selected via the administration of Oxford quick placement test and took a…

This study examines the relationship between different types of language learning aptitude (measured via the LLAMA test) and adult second language (L2) learners' attainment in speech production in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. Picture descriptions elicited from 50 Japanese EFL learners from varied proficiency levels were analyzed…

Full Text Available Foreign accent syndrome (FAS is a speech disorder that is defined by the emergence of a peculiar manner of articulation and intonation which is perceived as foreign. In most cases of acquired FAS (AFAS the new accent is secondary to small focal lesions involving components of the bilaterally distributed neural network for speech production. In the past few years FAS has also been described in different psychiatric conditions (conversion disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia as well as in developmental disorders (specific language impairment, apraxia of speech. In the present study, two adult males, one with atypical phonetic production and the other one with cluttering, reported having developmental FAS (DFAS since their adolescence. Perceptual analysis by naïve judges could not confirm the presence of foreign accent, possibly due to the mildness of the speech disorder. However, detailed linguistic analysis provided evidence of prosodic and segmental errors previously reported in AFAS cases. Cognitive testing showed reduced communication in activities of daily living and mild deficits related to psychiatric disorders. Psychiatric evaluation revealed long-lasting internalizing disorders (neuroticism, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, depression, alexithymia, hopelessness, and apathy in both subjects. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI data from each subject with DFAS were compared with data from a group of 21 age- and gender-matched healthy control subjects. Diffusion parameters (MD, AD, and RD in predefined regions of interest showed changes of white matter microstructure in regions previously related with AFAS and psychiatric disorders. In conclusion, the present findings militate against the possibility that these two subjects have FAS of psychogenic origin. Rather, our findings provide evidence that mild DFAS occurring in the context of subtle, yet persistent, developmental speech disorders may be associated with

The literature on perceptual learning for speech shows that listeners use lexical information to disambiguate phonetically ambiguous speech sounds and that they maintain this new mapping for later recognition of ambiguous sounds for a given talker. Evidence for this kind of perceptual reorganization has focused on phonetic category boundary shifts. Here, we asked whether listeners adjust both category boundaries and internal category structure in rapid adaptation to foreign accents. We investigated the perceptual learning of Mandarin-accented productions of word-final voiced stops in English. After exposure to a Mandarin speaker's productions, native-English listeners' adaptation to the talker was tested in 3 ways: a cross-modal priming task to assess spoken word recognition (Experiment 1), a category identification task to assess shifts in the phonetic boundary (Experiment 2), and a goodness rating task to assess internal category structure (Experiment 3). Following exposure, both category boundary and internal category structure were adjusted; moreover, these prelexical changes facilitated subsequent word recognition. Together, the results demonstrate that listeners' sensitivity to acoustic-phonetic detail in the accented input promoted a dynamic, comprehensive reorganization of their perceptual response as a consequence of exposure to the accented input. We suggest that an examination of internal category structure is important for a complete account of the mechanisms of perceptual learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

The current classroom acoustics standard (ANSI S12.60-2010) recommends core learning spaces not to exceed background noise level (BNL) of 35 dBA and reverberation time (RT) of 0.6 second, based on speech intelligibility performance mainly by the native English-speaking population. Existing literature has not correlated these recommended values well with student learning outcomes. With a growing population of non-native English speakers in American classrooms, the special needs for perceiving degraded speech among non-native listeners, either due to realistic room acoustics or talker foreign accent, have not been addressed in the current standard. This research seeks to investigate the effects of BNL and RT on the comprehension of English speech from native English and native Mandarin Chinese talkers as perceived by native and non-native English listeners, and to provide acoustic design guidelines to supplement the existing standard. This dissertation presents two studies on the effects of RT and BNL on more realistic classroom learning experiences. How do native and non-native English-speaking listeners perform on speech comprehension tasks under adverse acoustic conditions, if the English speech is produced by talkers of native English (Study 1) versus native Mandarin Chinese (Study 2)? Speech comprehension materials were played back in a listening chamber to individual listeners: native and non-native English-speaking in Study 1; native English, native Mandarin Chinese, and other non-native English-speaking in Study 2. Each listener was screened for baseline English proficiency level, and completed dual tasks simultaneously involving speech comprehension and adaptive dot-tracing under 15 acoustic conditions, comprised of three BNL conditions (RC-30, 40, and 50) and five RT scenarios (0.4 to 1.2 seconds). The results show that BNL and RT negatively affect both objective performance and subjective perception of speech comprehension, more severely for non

Full Text Available Under the pervasive influence of United States First Amendment jurisprudence, adult gender-specific sexually explicit (or “pornographic” material is conceptualized, and thus protected in the “marketplace of ideas”, as a particular mode of expression; to be viewed as part of the fabric of an open, free and democratic society. The values which free expression are seen to promote centre upon the advancement of political debate and promotion of personal self-fulfilment and autonomy. Attempts to conceptualise sexually explicit material within a gender-specific human rights framework present distinct challenges which, in a patriarchal legal and political design, appear to be near insurmountable. These challenges seem to be related to the enduring impact of the common law conception of obscenity (with its strong moralistic overtones on the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, coupled with a subjective libertarian-inspired test, and the Supreme Court’s general reluctance (also echoed by the South African Constitutional Court to consider a gender-specific conception of harm emanating from feminist arguments premised upon women’s constitutional interests in human dignity, equality and bodily integrity. The social revolution of the 1960s, coupled with the women’s liberation movement, called for a distinct departure from the traditional conception of sexually explicit material as a mode of constitutionally defendable free speech and expression, a conception which unavoidably calls for a moralistic approach, separating acceptable forms of expression from those not deemed worthy of (constitutional protection (termed “obscenity”, specifically created to satisfy the “prurient interest”. The Supreme Court’s obscenity jurisprudence is characterised by two key features. First, the court subscribes to an abstract concept of free speech, which proceeds from the assumption that all speech is of equal value, and thereby surmises

To evaluate the prevalence of external ear complications among Iranian aural foreign body users attending to otolaryngology clinic of our hospital. In this cross-sectional study patients attending to Otolaryngology clinics of Baqiyatallah hospital were enrolled regardless of their age, gender and reason of attending. Patients between 15 and 60 years of age were included in the present study. Those with positive history of chronic ear diseases, ear surgery, congenital ear disorders, trauma to ear or head and neck region or shock wave trauma were excluded from the study. Demographic information as well as data on chief complaint, educational level, frequency and type of used foreign body and findings of physical examination and Otoscopy by a single otolaryngologist were recorded in a predesigned checklist. Eventually 362 patients (232 male and 130 female) with a mean age of 40.32 ± 16.90 years underwent analysis. Of all patients 244 (67.2%) were using a kind of aural foreign body frequently and Cotton bud was the most popular (63.5%) used foreign body among patients. Drying ear canal was the most common (54.9%) reason of using AFBs among study individuals followed by itching (29.5%) and pyorrhea (11.06%). Also 11 (4.5%) patients were using AFBs as a habit with no specific reason. Itching was the most prevalent symptom reported by both aural foreign body users (78%) and non-users (45.5%); however it was significantly higher among AFB users (p = 0.026). Also hearing loss was significantly more reported by AFB users (p = 0.033). A majority of patients had normal physical examination in both AFB users and non-users group. Inflammation of ear canal was significantly more detected in AFB users (p = 0.004). In addition, rate of right ear wax impaction was higher among AFB users (p = 0.016). In conclusion we realized that 67.2% of patients attending to Otolaryngology clinic of our hospital were using a kind of aural foreign bodies and itching was the most common chief

The current Swedish Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström, has in her foreign policy statement claimed that a feminist foreign policy will be an integral part of activities throughout the Swedish Foreign Service. Even though an explicit ‘feminist foreign policy’ is a rather recent and ‘Swedish’ phenomenon, foreign policies in line with such a general ‘feminist’ agenda may have been implemented throughout history, by various foreign policy leaders. The question is, does the gender of leaders matt...

Purpose: The autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework represents an established methodology for intonational analysis in unimpaired speaker populations but has found little application in describing intonation in motor speech disorders (MSDs). This study compared the intonation patterns of unimpaired participants (CON) and those with Parkinson's…

People with speech, hearing, or mental impairment require special communication assistance, especially for medical purposes. Automatic solutions for speech recognition and voice synthesis from text are poor fits for communication in the medical domain because they are dependent on error-prone statistical models. Systems dependent on manual text input are insufficient. Recently introduced systems for automatic sign language recognition are dependent on statistical models as well as on image and gesture quality. Such systems remain in early development and are based mostly on minimal hand gestures unsuitable for medical purposes. Furthermore, solutions that rely on the Internet cannot be used after disasters that require humanitarian aid. We propose a high-speed, intuitive, Internet-free, voice-free, and text-free tool suited for emergency medical communication. Our solution is a pictogram-based application that provides easy communication for individuals who have speech or hearing impairment or mental health issues that impair communication, as well as foreigners who do not speak the local language. It provides support and clarification in communication by using intuitive icons and interactive symbols that are easy to use on a mobile device. Such pictogram-based communication can be quite effective and ultimately make people's lives happier, easier, and safer.

Full Text Available The article considers some pedagogical and information technological aspects of the preparation and use of the Russian as a foreign language teacher copyrighted electronic manuals. The purpose of the development is to support the process of formation and development of the foreign students’ basic skills in Russian speech in the form of extracurricular activities with elements of BYOD technologies. As well as to form the basic elements of the intercultural communication in a multi-ethnic environment, tolerance and other components of communicative competence. The manual contains text, dedicated to the national holiday Navruz and a series of exercises. It is designed as the word-online document and hosted on the MS-OneDrive cloud disk. The scheme presented allows foreign students to use their own mobile devices to access the materials via the Internet. The information product was used for the preparation of the study group to attend extracurricular activities. In addition, an electronic document that is hosted on the teacher’s cloud drive can be linked in the e-textbooks and on the teacher’s web sites, for example the MOODLE type systems.

This study examines student perspectives on gender differences in Japanese speech. Expanding on a small-scale survey by Siegal & Okamoto (2003) that investigated the views of eleven Japanese-language college teachers, this study analyzes 238 questionnaire responses from 220 Japanese-language students at four universities and a US government…

Traditionally, second language (L2) instruction has emphasised auditory-based instruction methods. However, this approach is restrictive in the sense that speech perception by humans is not just an auditory phenomenon but a multimodal one, and specifically, a visual one as well. In the past decade, experimental studies have shown that the…

Women are more intolerant of hate speech than men. This study examined relationality measures as mediators of gender differences in the perception of the harm of hate speech and the importance of freedom of speech. Participants were 107 male and 123 female college students. Questionnaires assessed the perceived harm of hate speech, the importance…

Conversational prosody or tone of voice (e.g. intonation, pauses, speech rate etc.) plays an essential role in our daily communication. Research studies in various contexts have shown that prosody can function as an interactional device for the management of our social interaction (Hellermann, 2003, Wennerstrom, 2001, Wells and Macfarlane, 1998, Couper-Kuhlen, 1996). However, not much research focus has been given to the pedagogical implications of conversational prosody in classroom teaching...

Professional broadcasting of future medical foreign workers in the medical sector is a compulsory component of their professional readiness. The diversity of professional broadcasting functions of foreign students, the skillful use of the entire range of speech functionality, its external expressive attributability of speech; these are the most…

Full Text Available Speech compression is a key technology underlying digital cellular communications, VoIP, voicemail, and voice response systems. We trace the evolution of speech coding based on the linear prediction model, highlight the key milestones in speech coding, and outline the structures of the most important speech coding standards. Current challenges, future research directions, fundamental limits on performance, and the critical open problem of speech coding for emergency first responders are all discussed.

Foreign-language learning is a prime example of a task that entails perceptual learning. The correct comprehension of foreign-language speech requires the correct recognition of speech sounds. The most difficult speech-sound contrasts for foreign-language learners often are the ones that have multiple phonetic cues, especially if the cues are…

This study asks how speakers adjust their speech to their addressees, focusing on the potential roles of cognitive representations such as partner models, automatic processes such as interactive alignment, and social processes such as interactional negotiation. The nature of addressee orientation......, psycholinguistics and conversation analysis, and offers both overviews of child-directed, foreigner-directed and robot-directed speech and in-depth analyses of the processes involved in adjusting to a communication partner....

This book gives descriptions of processing harmful waste, including concerned law and definition of harmful waste, current conditions and generation of harmful waste in Korea, international condition of harmful waste, minimizing of generation of harmful waste, treatment and storage. It also tells of basic science for harmful waste disposal with physics, chemistry, combustion engineering, microbiology and technique of disposal such as physical, chemical, biological process, stabilizing and solidification, incineration and waste in landfill.

Full Text Available ... advances to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your physician also may locate soft-tissue objects ... perform surgery using ultrasound guidance. Ultrasound provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding removal procedures. In some cases, it is potentially more harmful to ...

Full Text Available ... provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding removal procedures. In some cases, it is potentially more harmful to remove the ... provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding foreign body removal ... rare cases, the general anesthesia used during rigid esophagoscopy can ...

The article is devoted to the issue of grammatical approach application during the teaching of Russian etiquette speech for foreigners. In the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language, the issues related to the development of etiquette speech genres arise at all stages of language learning, beginning with the first ...

Consumer Guide Speech to Speech Relay Service Speech-to-Speech (STS) is one form of Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS). TRS is a service that allows persons with hearing and speech disabilities ...

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Self-harm refers to a person's harming their own body on purpose. About 1 in 100 people hurts himself or herself in this way. More females hurt themselves than males. A person who self-harms usually does not mean to kill himself or herself. But they are at higher risk of attempting suicide if they do ...

Speech is the predominant means of communication between human beings and since the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, speech services have remained to be the core service in almost all telecommunication systems. Original analog methods of telephony had the disadvantage of speech signal getting corrupted by noise, cross-talk and distortion Long haul transmissions which use repeaters to compensate for the loss in signal strength on transmission links also increase the associated noise and distortion. On the other hand digital transmission is relatively immune to noise, cross-talk and distortion primarily because of the capability to faithfully regenerate digital signal at each repeater purely based on a binary decision. Hence end-to-end performance of the digital link essentially becomes independent of the length and operating frequency bands of the link Hence from a transmission point of view digital transmission has been the preferred approach due to its higher immunity to noise. The need to carry digital speech became extremely important from a service provision point of view as well. Modem requirements have introduced the need for robust, flexible and secure services that can carry a multitude of signal types (such as voice, data and video) without a fundamental change in infrastructure. Such a requirement could not have been easily met without the advent of digital transmission systems, thereby requiring speech to be coded digitally. The term Speech Coding is often referred to techniques that represent or code speech signals either directly as a waveform or as a set of parameters by analyzing the speech signal. In either case, the codes are transmitted to the distant end where speech is reconstructed or synthesized using the received set of codes. A more generic term that is applicable to these techniques that is often interchangeably used with speech coding is the term voice coding. This term is more generic in the sense that the

Full Text Available The deliberate self-harm behaviour which defined as attempting to own body resulting in tisue damage without conscious desire of peolple to die, is a major public health problem worldwide. The causes of deliberate self- harm, risk factors, the relationship between mental disorders and treatment strategies are not fully known. Deliberate self- harm can be observed together with psychiatric disorders such as borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, eating disorders and mood disorders. Also, deliberate self-harm must be distinguished from suicidal behavior. Psychologi-cal trauma has been suggested as a risk factor for deliberate self- harm behavior. Trauma and traumatic events have long been associated with deliberate self- harm behavior. The aim of this review article is to investigate the etiology and epidemiology of deliberate self-harm behaviour and relationship between psychiatric disorders. [Psikiyatride Guncel Yaklasimlar - Current Approaches in Psychiatry 2017; 9(2.000: 209-226

Purpose: The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. Method: Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5…

To gain a better understanding of self-harm, a 28-year-old female patient and a 19-year-old female patient with self-harming behaviour are presented. The first patient refused treatment of cut wounds when the doctor enquired about the reason for self-harm. The second patient was referred for mental health care. These cases illustrate the complexity of this behaviour for the patient and the caregiver. Self-harm is often a symbol of underlying problems and serves multiple psychological functions. It is mostly used by patients to cope with unbearable emotions for which they have no other solution. The self-harm invokes different feelings in caregivers which tend to influence the attitude of the caregiver towards the patient. It is very important that caregivers are aware of their feelings and use them professionally. People who self-harm should not be judged, but treated respectfully and attention should be paid to their suffering.

The term self-harm is commonly used to describe a wide range of behaviours and intentions including attempted hanging, impulsive self-poisoning, and superficial cutting in response to intolerable tension. As with suicide, rates of self-harm vary greatly between countries. 5-9% of adolescents in western countries report having self-harmed within the previous year. Risk factors include socioeconomic disadvantage, and psychiatric illness--particularly depression, substance abuse, and anxiety disorders. Cultural aspects of some societies may protect against suicide and self-harm and explain some of the international variation in rates of these events. Risk of repetition of self-harm and of later suicide is high. More than 5% of people who have been seen at a hospital after self-harm will have committed suicide within 9 years. Assessment after self-harm includes careful consideration of the patient's intent and beliefs about the lethality of the method used. Strong suicidal intent, high lethality, precautions against being discovered, and psychiatric illness are indicators of high suicide risk. Management after self-harm includes forming a trusting relationship with the patient, jointly identifying problems, ensuring support is available in a crisis, and treating psychiatric illness vigorously. Family and friends may also provide support. Large-scale studies of treatments for specific subgroups of people who self-harm might help to identify more effective treatments than are currently available. Although risk factors for self-harm are well established, aspects that protect people from engaging in self-harm need to be further explored.

Speech is crucial for communication in everyday life. Speech-brain entrainment, the alignment of neural activity to the slow temporal fluctuations (envelope) of acoustic speech input, is a ubiquitous element of current theories of speech processing. Associations between speech-brain entrainment and

Full Text Available The article deals with the problem of developing listening skills for improving foreign language communicative competence. The practical value of using an authentic foreign language text at a foreign language lesson is determined. The ways of the use of the English language recordings in the educational process of students are outlined. It is found out that tracks with foreign information should be used only in the certain methodical situations. Multimedia helps effectively a teacher to achieve outlined objectives of improving foreign language communicative competence for multiple repetition of a speech model for making permanent listening item of language units. The basic stages of work with foreign language recordings are determined: teaching a foreign language listening (teaching to listen and understand the foreign language track means to overcome the methodological difficulties that require a certain amount of time and special training. This is explained by the fact that there are lots of difficulties on the way of understanding a foreign language: an unusual speed of speech, presence of unknown vocabulary, specific rhythms and melody; teaching a foreign language speech with the special models pronounced by foreign speakers (teaching students to practical mastery of a foreign language is intrinsically linked with involvement into the educational process of original English tracks, those are made by highly skilled experts (foreign speakers; learning a new vocabulary due to a dialogue, an extract of a play or a conversation, songs, prose and poetry (it is noted that the students’ interest of learning foreign language songs and poems is extremely high, and it primarily promotes strong learning; analysing the recorded students’ speech (fixing student’s speech and analysing their mistakes is very important at any stage of learning a foreign language for self-control and self-correction.

In digital speech-communication systems like mobile phones, public address systems and hearing aids, conveying the message is one of the most important goals. This can be challenging since the intelligibility of the speech may be harmed at various stages before, during and after the transmission

Several articles addressing topics in speech research are presented. The topics include: exploring the functional significance of physiological tremor: A biospectroscopic approach; differences between experienced and inexperienced listeners to deaf speech; a language-oriented view of reading and its disabilities; Phonetic factors in letter detection; categorical perception; Short-term recall by deaf signers of American sign language; a common basis for auditory sensory storage in perception and immediate memory; phonological awareness and verbal short-term memory; initiation versus execution time during manual and oral counting by stutterers; trading relations in the perception of speech by five-year-old children; the role of the strap muscles in pitch lowering; phonetic validation of distinctive features; consonants and syllable boundaires; and vowel information in postvocalic frictions.

Full Text Available The manifesto of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is based on the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory. This theory is a key starting point for hate speech amongst many right-wing extremists in Europe, but also has ramifications beyond these environments. In brief, proponents of the Eurabia theory claim that Muslims are occupying Europe and destroying Western culture, with the assistance of the EU and European governments. By contrast, members of Al-Qaeda and other extreme Islamists promote the conspiracy theory “the Crusade” in their hate speech directed against the West. Proponents of the latter theory argue that the West is leading a crusade to eradicate Islam and Muslims, a crusade that is similarly facilitated by their governments. This article presents analyses of texts written by right-wing extremists and Muslim extremists in an effort to shed light on how hate speech promulgates conspiracy theories in order to spread hatred and intolerance.The aim of the article is to contribute to a more thorough understanding of hate speech’s nature by applying rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical analysis is chosen because it offers a means of understanding the persuasive power of speech. It is thus a suitable tool to describe how hate speech works to convince and persuade. The concepts from rhetorical theory used in this article are ethos, logos and pathos. The concept of ethos is used to pinpoint factors that contributed to Osama bin Laden's impact, namely factors that lent credibility to his promotion of the conspiracy theory of the Crusade. In particular, Bin Laden projected common sense, good morals and good will towards his audience. He seemed to have coherent and relevant arguments; he appeared to possess moral credibility; and his use of language demonstrated that he wanted the best for his audience.The concept of pathos is used to define hate speech, since hate speech targets its audience's emotions. In hate speech it is the

We live in a noisy world! In all applications (telecommunications, hands-free communications, recording, human-machine interfaces, etc.) that require at least one microphone, the signal of interest is usually contaminated by noise and reverberation. As a result, the microphone signal has to be ""cleaned"" with digital signal processing tools before it is played out, transmitted, or stored.This book is about speech enhancement. Different well-known and state-of-the-art methods for noise reduction, with one or multiple microphones, are discussed. By speech enhancement, we mean not only noise red

as harmful algal bloom. Bloom formation is a natural process and it enhances biological productivity, but turns worrisome when caused by toxic species, leading to massive fish mortalities and hazards to human health. Incidences of'red tide' are increasing...

Speech intelligibility (SI) is important for different fields of research, engineering and diagnostics in order to quantify very different phenomena like the quality of recordings, communication and playback devices, the reverberation of auditoria, characteristics of hearing impairment, benefit using hearing aids or combinations of these things.

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a relatively rare speech motor disorder in which the pro- nunciation of an affected speaker is perceived as distinctly foreign by listeners of the same language community. Because of various close semiological resemblances with apraxia of speech, FAS has been

This monograph contains a critical examination of President Carter's view on ethics and foreign policy as expressed in his commencement speech at Notre Dame University on May 22, 1977. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 contains Mr. Carter's speech entitled, "Power for Humane Purposes." Part 2 contains nine responses to the…

Foreign aid has evolved significantly since the Second World War in response to a dramatically changing global political and economic context. This article (a) reviews this process and associated trends in the volume and distribution of foreign aid; (b) reviews the goals, principles...

Foreign aid has evolved significantly since the Second World War in response to a dramatically changing global political and economic context. This article (a) reviews this process and associated trends in the volume and distribution of foreign aid; (b) reviews the goals, principles and instituti......Foreign aid has evolved significantly since the Second World War in response to a dramatically changing global political and economic context. This article (a) reviews this process and associated trends in the volume and distribution of foreign aid; (b) reviews the goals, principles...... and institutions of the aid system; and (c) discusses whether aid has been effective. While much of the original optimism about the impact of foreign aid needed modification, there is solid evidence that aid has indeed helped further growth and poverty reduction...

An accessible business school population of undergraduate students was investigated in three independent, but related studies to determine effects on grades due to cutting class and failing to take advantage of optional reviews and study quizzes. It was hypothesized that cutting classes harms exam scores, attending preexam reviews helps exam…

It has been difficult to secure funding in Denmark to conduct research on third party harm from alcohol. The author relates her experiences in this area and challenges Danish society to examine how other societies have begun to examine this problem....

The VDE system developed had the capability of recognizing up to 248 separate words in syntactic structures. 4 The two systems described are isolated...AND SPEAKER RECOGNITION by M.J.Hunt 5 ASSESSMENT OF SPEECH SYSTEMS ’ ..- * . by R.K.Moore 6 A SURVEY OF CURRENT EQUIPMENT AND RESEARCH’ by J.S.Bridle...TECHNOLOGY IN NAVY TRAINING SYSTEMS by R.Breaux, M.Blind and R.Lynchard 10 9 I-I GENERAL REVIEW OF MILITARY APPLICATIONS OF VOICE PROCESSING DR. BRUNO

Full Text Available This paper presents a method of speech recognition by pattern recognition techniques. Learning consists in determining the unique characteristics of a word (cepstral coefficients by eliminating those characteristics that are different from one word to another. For learning and recognition, the system will build a dictionary of words by determining the characteristics of each word to be used in the recognition. Determining the characteristics of an audio signal consists in the following steps: noise removal, sampling it, applying Hamming window, switching to frequency domain through Fourier transform, calculating the magnitude spectrum, filtering data, determining cepstral coefficients.

The paper describes development of the educational online web communication platform for teaching and learning foreign languages. The main objective was to develop a web application for teaching foreigners to understand casual fluent speech. The system is based on the time bank principle, allowing users to teach others their native language along…

When a target-speech/masker mixture is processed with the signal-separation technique, ideal binary mask (IBM), intelligibility of target speech is remarkably improved in both normal-hearing listeners and hearing-impaired listeners. Intelligibility of speech can also be improved by filling in speech gaps with un-modulated broadband noise. This study investigated whether intelligibility of target speech in the IBM-treated target-speech/masker mixture can be further improved by adding a broadband-noise background. The results of this study show that following the IBM manipulation, which remarkably released target speech from speech-spectrum noise, foreign-speech, or native-speech masking (experiment 1), adding a broadband-noise background with the signal-to-noise ratio no less than 4 dB significantly improved intelligibility of target speech when the masker was either noise (experiment 2) or speech (experiment 3). The results suggest that since adding the noise background shallows the areas of silence in the time-frequency domain of the IBM-treated target-speech/masker mixture, the abruption of transient changes in the mixture is smoothed and the perceived continuity of target-speech components becomes enhanced, leading to improved target-speech intelligibility. The findings are useful for advancing computational auditory scene analysis, hearing-aid/cochlear-implant designs, and understanding of speech perception under "cocktail-party" conditions.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce — The Foreign Trade database has monthly volume and value information for US imports, exports, and re-exports of fishery or fishery derived products. Data is...

What are Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs)? Freshwater and marine harmful algal blooms (HABs) can occur anytime water use is impaired due to excessive accumulations of algae. HAB occurrence is affected by a complex set of physical, chemical, biological, hydrological, and meteorological conditions making it difficult to isolate specific causative environmental factors. Potential impairments include reduction in water quality, accumulation of malodorous scums in beach areas, algal production of toxins potent enough to poison both aquatic and terrestrial organisms, and algal production of taste-and-odor compounds that cause unpalatable drinking water and fish. HABs are a global problem, and toxic freshwater and (or) marine algae have been implicated in human and animal illness and death in over 45 countries worldwide and in at least 27 U.S. States (Yoo and others, 1995; Chorus and Bartram, 1999; Huisman and others, 2005).

Although drugs are haram and therefore prohibited in Islam, illicit drug use is widespread in many Islamic countries throughout the world. In the last several years increased prevalence of this problem has been observed in many of these countries which has in turn led to increasing injecting drug use driven HIV/AIDS epidemic across the Islamic world. Whilst some countries have recently responded to the threat through the implementation of harm reduction programmes, many others have been slow to respond. In Islam, The Quran and the Prophetic traditions or the Sunnah are the central sources of references for the laws and principles that guide the Muslims' way of life and by which policies and guidelines for responses including that of contemporary social and health problems can be derived. The preservation and protection of the dignity of man, and steering mankind away from harm and destruction are central to the teachings of Islam. When viewed through the Islamic principles of the preservation and protection of the faith, life, intellect, progeny and wealth, harm reduction programmes are permissible and in fact provide a practical solution to a problem that could result in far greater damage to the society at large if left unaddressed. Copyright (c) 2009. Published by Elsevier B.V.

This paper provides an analysis of the impacts of machine translation and speech synthesis on speech-to-speech translation systems. The speech-to-speech translation system consists of three components: speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. Many techniques for integration of speech recognition and machine translation have been proposed. However, speech synthesis has not yet been considered. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on machine translation and speech synthesis, ...

Background: Harm reduction is commonly regarded as complementary to other drug problem responses - as the fourth tier. Yet even core examples of harm reduction such as the provision of injection equipment and methadone treatment has over and over encountered considerable opposition, and harm redu...

The EMCDDA’s 10th scientific monograph, entitled Harm reduction: evidence, impacts and challenges provides a comprehensive overview of the harm reduction field. Part I of the monograph looks back at the emergence of harm reduction approaches and their diffusion, and explores the concept from diff...

Despite the importance of foreign news, its history, transformation and indeed its future have not been much studied. The scholarly community often calls attention to journalism's shortcomings covering the world, yet the topic has not been systematically examined across countries or over time. The need to redress this neglect and the desire to assess the impact of new media technologies on the future of journalism - including foreign correspondence - provide the motivation for this stimulating, exciting and thought-provoking book. While the old economic models supporting news have crumbled in

The motor theory of speech perception holds that we perceive the speech of another in terms of a motor representation of that speech. However, when we have learned to recognize a foreign accent, it seems plausible that recognition of a word rarely involves reconstruction of the speech gestures of the speaker rather than the listener. To better assess the motor theory and this observation, we proceed in three stages. Part 1 places the motor theory of speech perception in a larger framework based on our earlier models of the adaptive formation of mirror neurons for grasping, and for viewing extensions of that mirror system as part of a larger system for neuro-linguistic processing, augmented by the present consideration of recognizing speech in a novel accent. Part 2 then offers a novel computational model of how a listener comes to understand the speech of someone speaking the listener's native language with a foreign accent. The core tenet of the model is that the listener uses hypotheses about the word the speaker is currently uttering to update probabilities linking the sound produced by the speaker to phonemes in the native language repertoire of the listener. This, on average, improves the recognition of later words. This model is neutral regarding the nature of the representations it uses (motor vs. auditory). It serve as a reference point for the discussion in Part 3, which proposes a dual-stream neuro-linguistic architecture to revisits claims for and against the motor theory of speech perception and the relevance of mirror neurons, and extracts some implications for the reframing of the motor theory.

Full Text Available We measure foreign exchange exposures as sensitivity of firm's value to FX premium in the CAPM plus FX premium model, and try to find determinants of the exposures; using data of non-financial companies listed in the Korea Exchange from the year 2007 to 2008. Main findings are as follows. If Korean won depreciates, only a small number of firms is benefitted while majority of firms are harmed to the contrary of common knowledge. As a firm's export increases, the foreign exchange exposure increases up to a certain level and after that it declines. And, smaller firms of negative foreign exchange exposures are more sensitive to foreign exchange changes. These suggest heterogeneous effects of foreign exchange rates on industries and firms.

Full Text Available ... percent of foreign body ingestions occur among children. Most foreign bodies pass through the gastrointestinal tract without ... fainting and shock. Foreign bodies in the airway: Most foreign bodies in the airway are usually expelled ...

Full Text Available Abstract: Iltifat (shifting speech act is distinctive and considered unique style of Arabic. It has potential errors when it is translated into Indonesian. Therefore, translation of iltifat speech act into another language can be an important issue. The objective of the study is to know translation procedures/techniques and ideology required in dealing with iltifat speech act. This research is directed at translation as a cognitive product of a translator. The data used in the present study were the corpus of Koranic verses that contain iltifat speech act along with their translation. Data analysis typically used descriptive-evaluative method with content analysis model. The data source of this research consisted of the Koran and its translation. The purposive sampling technique was employed, with the sample of the iltifat speech act contained in the Koran. The results showed that more than 60% of iltifat speech act were translated by using literal procedure. The significant number of literal translation of the verses asserts that the Ministry of Religious Affairs tended to use literal method of translation. In other words, the Koran translation made by the Ministry of Religious Affairs tended to be oriented to the source language in dealing with iltifat speech act. The number of the literal procedure used shows a tendency of foreignization ideology. Transitional pronouns contained in the iltifat speech act can be clearly translated when thick translations were used in the form of description in parentheses. In this case, explanation can be a choice in translating iltifat speech act.

Full Text Available Since several years nanoparticles (NPs are produced by industries and used in several fields of activities. They are finally found in aquatic and terrestrial environments, where they are ingested by living organisms in which they accumulate, before being eliminated. In organisms, NPs represent foreign elements with their own physicochemical properties due to their small size. So NPs may interfere with the normal physiological mechanisms of the embryos, growing animals, and adults, and it is indispensable to understand their potentially direct or indirect harmful effects on living organisms. It has been already shown that NPs could be toxic to bacteria, algae, invertebrates, and vertebrates. In this review, several examples of recent studies are given. We will examine successively the effects of NPs on terrestrial and semiaquatic and aquatic vertebrate and invertebrate animals.

The 17 articles in this collection deal with theoretical and practical freedom of speech issues. The topics include: freedom of speech in Marquette Park, Illinois; Nazis in Skokie, Illinois; freedom of expression in the Confederate States of America; Robert M. LaFollette's arguments for free speech and the rights of Congress; the United States…

Models of speech learning suggest that adaptations to foreign language sound categories take place within 6-12 months of exposure to a foreign language. Results from laboratory language training show effects of very targeted training on non-native speech contrasts within only one to three weeks...... of training. Results from immersion studies are inconclusive, but some suggest continued effects on non-native speech perception after 6-8 years of experience. We investigated this apparent discrepancy in the timing of adaptation to foreignspeech sounds in a longitudinal study of foreign language learning....... We examined two groups of Danish language officer cadets learning either Arabic (MSA and Egyptian Arabic) or Dari (Afghan Farsi) through intensive multi-faceted language training. We conducted two experiments (identification and discrimination) with the cadets who were tested four times: at the start...

Full Text Available The process of globalisation has led, among other things, to harmful tax competition. This paper considers the efforts within the EU in combating harmful tax competition (Code of Conduct on Business Taxation and their effects when taking into account the EU regulations in relation to state aids. Considering a number of problems in the implementation of the Code, and the numerous criticisms with regard to the validity of the combat against harmful tax competition – it is difficult to give a final answer about its success. Croatian tax system, and the corporation tax in particular, are analysed in the light of the aforementioned problems. The advantages of the equal treatment of domestic and foreign investors, as well as the certain elements of state aids in tax benefits, are pointed out.

Approximately 14 to 17 percent of adolescents today self-harm, deliberately cutting, burning, or bruising themselves. Most self-harming adolescents use the behavior as a coping strategy to get immediate relief from emotional distress or other stressors in their lives. Stressors include fitting in with peers, activity and homework overload, fears…

The present paper describes the results of a rating study performed by a group of European Union (EU) drug experts using the multi-criteria decision analysis model for evaluating drug harms. Forty drug experts from throughout the EU scored 20 drugs on 16 harm criteria. The expert group also assessed

Digital Speech Processing Using Matlab deals with digital speech pattern recognition, speech production model, speech feature extraction, and speech compression. The book is written in a manner that is suitable for beginners pursuing basic research in digital speech processing. Matlab illustrations are provided for most topics to enable better understanding of concepts. This book also deals with the basic pattern recognition techniques (illustrated with speech signals using Matlab) such as PCA, LDA, ICA, SVM, HMM, GMM, BPN, and KSOM.

Background: Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare speech disorder leading to a perceived presence of a new accent in a speaker’s speech. Until now, around 100 cases of FAS have been reported. It is striking that in most cases the perception of the accent is in one consistent direction, namely from

The results of our previous research on the pedagogical use of Speaking Robots (SRs) revealed positive effects on motivating students to practice their oral skills in a stress-free environment. However, our findings indicated that the SR was sometimes unable to understand students' foreign accented speech. In this paper, we report the results of a…

In previous research on speech imitation, musicality, and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Forty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64% of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66% of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi) could be explained by working memory together with a singer's sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and auditory memory with singing fitting better into the category of "speech" on the productive level and "music" on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways. (1) Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. (2) Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. (3) The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory working memory.

Full Text Available In previous research on speech imitation, musicality and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Fourty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64 % of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66 % of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi could be explained by working memory together with a singer’s sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and sound memory with singing fitting better into the category of "speech" on the productive level and "music" on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways. 1. Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. 2. Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. 3. The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory short term memory.

Full Text Available ... top of page What are the benefits vs. risks? Benefits Removal of a foreign body will reduce ... good tool for guiding foreign body removal procedures. Risks While foreign body removal procedures are safe and ...

Full Text Available ... 80 percent of foreign body ingestions occur among children. Most foreign bodies pass through the gastrointestinal tract ... blockages that may require surgical removal of magnets. Children account for about 80 percent of foreign body ...

last 10 years.12 Apart from the cost of medical care, the cost of alcohol use can also be associated with absenteeism and property damage. Alcohol...related harms cost British industry approximately £2 billion a year13 and the NHS about £1.7 billion a year14. Alcohol affects labour and productivity...Harmful drinking, Factsheet, June (2007). 15 “ Absenteeism due to drink”, Healthcare Today Magazine, September 19th, 2007. (Accessed on 19/09/07, at

Speech alarms have been used extensively in aviation and included in International Building Codes (IBC) and National Fire Protection Association's (NFPA) Life Safety Code. However, they have not been implemented on space vehicles. Previous studies conducted at NASA JSC showed that speech alarms lead to faster identification and higher accuracy. This research evaluated updated speech and tone alerts in a laboratory environment and in the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) in a realistic setup.

Full Text Available The paper deals with the problem of automatic phonetic segmentation ofspeech signals, namely for speech analysis and recognition purposes.Several methods and approaches are described and evaluated from thepoint of view of their accuracy. A complete instruction for creating anannotated database for training a Czech speech recognition system isprovided together with the authors' own experience. The results of thework have found practical applications, for example, in developing atool for semi-automatic speech segmentation, building alarge-vocabulary phoneme-based speech recognition system and designingan aid for learning and practicing pronunciation of words or phrases inthe native or a foreign language.

First language acquisition requires relatively little effort compared to foreign language acquisition and happens more naturally through informal learning. Informal exposure can also benefit foreign language learning, although evidence for this has been limited to speech perception and production. An important question is whether informal exposure to spoken foreign language also leads to vocabulary learning through the creation of form-meaning links. Here we tested the impact of exposure to foreign language words presented with pictures in an incidental learning phase on subsequent explicit foreign language learning. In the explicit learning phase, we asked adults to learn translation equivalents of foreign language words, some of which had appeared in the incidental learning phase. Results revealed rapid learning of the foreign language words in the incidental learning phase showing that informal exposure to multi-modal foreign language leads to foreign language vocabulary acquisition. The creation of form-meaning links during the incidental learning phase is discussed.

An introduction is given to the the anatomy and the function of the ear, basic psychoacoustic matters (hearing threshold, loudness, masking), the speech signal and speech intelligibility. The lecture note is written for the course: Fundamentals of Acoustics and Noise Control (51001)......An introduction is given to the the anatomy and the function of the ear, basic psychoacoustic matters (hearing threshold, loudness, masking), the speech signal and speech intelligibility. The lecture note is written for the course: Fundamentals of Acoustics and Noise Control (51001)...

It is becoming increasingly apparent that all forms of communication-including voice-will be transmitted through packet-switched networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the design of modern devices that rely on speech interfaces, such as cell phones and PDAs, requires a complete and up-to-date understanding of the basics of speech coding. Outlines key signal processing algorithms used to mitigate impairments to speech quality in VoIP networksOffering a detailed yet easily accessible introduction to the field, Principles of Speech Coding provides an in-depth examination of the

Full Text Available Language therapy has trafficked from a medical focus until a preventive focus. However, difficulties are evidenced in the development of this last task, because he is devoted bigger space to the correction of the disorders of the language. Because the speech disorders is the dysfunction with more frequently appearance, acquires special importance the preventive work that is developed to avoid its appearance. Speech education since early age of the childhood makes work easier for prevent the appearance of speech disorders in the children. The present work has as objective to offer different activities for the prevention of the speech disorders.

Full Text Available The paper discusses the use of words of foreign origin in Slovenian political discourse. At the outset, this usage is broken down into four groups: the first contains specific phrases and terminology inherent to the political domain; the second contains words of foreign origin generally present in the Slovene language (because of their high frequency of nonexclusivistic use, these words are not of interest to the scope of this investigation; the third contains various words of foreign origin used as affectional packaging for messages with the aim of stimulating the desired interpretation (framing reality; the fourth group, which is the most interesting for our research, is made up of words of foreign origin which could have a marker: + marked, + not necessary, + unwanted, but only if we accept the logic of purism. All the words in this group could be replaced - without any loss of meaning - with their Slovene equivalents. The speakerʼs motivation for using the foreign word is crucial to our discussion. In the framework of Pierre Bourdieuʼs poststructural theory as well as Austinʼs and Searleʼs speech act theory, statistical data is analysed to observe how usage frequency varies in correlation with selected factors which manifest the speakerʼs habitus. We argue that words of foreign origin represent symbolic cultural capital, a kind of added value which functions as credit and as such is an important form of the accumulation of capital.

Full Text Available The paper discusses the use of words of foreign origin in Slovenian political discourse. At the outset, this usage is broken down into four groups: the first contains specific phrases and terminology inherent to the political domain; the second contains words of foreign origin generally present in the Slovene language (because of their high frequency of nonexclusivistic use, these words are not of interest to the scope of this investigation; the third contains various words of foreign origin used as affectional packaging for messages with the aim of stimulating the desired interpretation (framing reality; the fourth group, which is the most interesting for our research, is made up of words of foreign origin which could have a marker: + marked, + not necessary, + unwanted, but only if we accept the logic of purism. All the words in this group could be replaced - without any loss of meaning - with their Slovene equivalents. The speakerʼs motivation for using the foreign word is crucial to our discussion. In the framework of Pierre Bourdieuʼs poststructural theory as well as Austinʼs and Searleʼs speech act theory, statistical data is analysed to observe how usage frequency varies in correlation with selected factors which manifest the speakerʼs habitus. We argue that words of foreign origin represent symbolic cultural capital, a kind of added value which functions as credit and as such is an important form of the accumulation of capital.

Learning spoken word forms is a vital part of second language learning, and CALL lends itself well to this training. Not enough is known, however, about how auditory variation across speech tokens may affect receptive word learning. To find out, 144 Thai university students with no knowledge of the Patani Malay language learned 24 foreign words in…

In previous research on speech imitation, musicality, and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Forty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64% of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66% of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi) could be explained by working memory together with a singer's sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and auditory memory with singing fitting better into the category of “speech” on the productive level and “music” on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways. (1) Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. (2) Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. (3) The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory working memory. PMID:24319438

Sex work is an extremely dangerous profession. The use of harm-reduction principles can help to safeguard sex workers' lives in the same way that drug users have benefited from drug-use harm reduction. Sex workers are exposed to serious harms: drug use, disease, violence, discrimination, debt, criminalisation, and exploitation (child prostitution, trafficking for sex work, and exploitation of migrants). Successful and promising harm-reduction strategies are available: education, empowerment, prevention, care, occupational health and safety, decriminalisation of sex workers, and human-rights-based approaches. Successful interventions include peer education, training in condom-negotiating skills, safety tips for street-based sex workers, male and female condoms, the prevention-care synergy, occupational health and safety guidelines for brothels, self-help organisations, and community-based child protection networks. Straightforward and achievable steps are available to improve the day-to-day lives of sex workers while they continue to work. Conceptualising and debating sex-work harm reduction as a new paradigm can hasten this process.

Suprasegmental features are essential in conveying meaning; however, they are one of the neglected topics in teaching Turkish as a foreign/second language. This paper aims to examine read speech by Arabic students learning Turkish as a second language and describe their read speech in terms of stress and pause. Within this framework, 34 Syrian…

From its early development in the 1960s, speech act theory always had an individualistic orientation. It focused exclusively on speech acts performed by individual agents. Paradigmatic examples are ‘I promise that p’, ‘I order that p’, and ‘I declare that p’. There is a single speaker and a single

Authoritarian teaching practices in ballet inhibit the use of private speech. This paper highlights the critical importance of private speech in the cognitive development of young ballet students, within what is largely a non-verbal art form. It draws upon research by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and contemporary socioculturalists, to…

The 11 articles in this collection deal with theoretical and practical freedom of speech issues. The topics covered are (1) the United States Supreme Court and communication theory; (2) truth, knowledge, and a democratic respect for diversity; (3) denial of freedom of speech in Jock Yablonski's campaign for the presidency of the United Mine…

Written for students in the fields of speech correction and audiology, the text deals with the following: structures involved in respiration; the skeleton and the processes of inhalation and exhalation; phonation and pitch, the larynx, and esophageal speech; muscles involved in articulation; muscles involved in resonance; and the anatomy of the…

AIM: To examine strategies of harm minimization employed by teenage drinkers. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Two periods of ethnographic fieldwork were conducted in a rural Danish community of approximately 2000 inhabitants. The fieldwork included 50 days of participant observation among 13....... In regulating the social context of drinking they relied on their personal experiences more than on formalized knowledge about alcohol and harm, which they had learned from prevention campaigns and educational programmes. CONCLUSIONS: In this study we found that teenagers may help each other to minimize alcohol...

Evidence for transfer of musical training to better perception of speech in noise has been mixed. Unlike speech-in-noise, speech-on-speech perception utilizes many of the skills that musical training improves, such as better pitch perception and stream segregation, as well as use of higher-level

Seven hearing impaired children (five to seven years old) assigned to the Speakers group made highly significant gains in speech production and auditory discrimination of speech, while Listeners made only slight speech production gains and no gains in auditory discrimination. Combined speech and auditory training was more effective than auditory…

To counter the negative effects of a product-harm crisis, brands hope to capitalize on their equity, and often use advertising as a communication device to regain customers’ lost trust. We study how consumer characteristics and advertising influence consumers’ first-purchase decisions for two

To study the nature of deliberate self-harm (DSH) in children and to identify the associated factors. Child Guidance Clinic attached to the Department of Pediatrics of a teaching hospital in South India. Children with history of deliberate self harm who were referred to the CGC for psychological evaluation during a 10 year period. Children and parents were interviewed together and separately and details regarding age, sex, family and school environment, stresses and nature of self harm were documented. Psychiatric diagnosis was made based on DSM IV diagnostic criteria. Among the 30 children included in the study, 21 were boys and 9 were girls. Majority of children were between the ages of 11 and 13 years, the youngest being 6 years old. 76%of children had history of acute stressful life events and 62%of them had chronic ongoing stress. 62%of children had stress in the family and 41%had stress at school. Stress in the family included death of a parent, conflicts with parents or siblings, mental illness in the family, parental alcoholism and parental disharmony. Stress at school included conflicts with classmates, punishment or negative comments by teachers and learning problems. Psychiatric disorders were present in 52%of children, the commonest being depressive disorder. The commonest mode of DSH was self poisoning, and rat poison (zinc phosphide) was the commonest substance used. Deliberate self harm occurs in young children and the risk factors are comparable to those in adolescents.

textabstractProduct-harm crises are among a firm’s worst nightmares. Since marketing investments may be instrumental to convince consumers to purchase the firm's products again, it is important to provide an adequate measurement of the effectiveness of these investments, especially after the crisis.

Relatively preserved inner speech alongside poor overt speech has been documented in some persons with aphasia (PWA), but the relationship of overt speech with inner speech is still largely unclear, as few studies have directly investigated these factors. The present study investigates the relationship of relatively preserved inner speech in aphasia with selected measures of language and cognition. Thirty-eight persons with chronic aphasia (27 men, 11 women; average age 64.53 ± 13.29 years, time since stroke 8-111 months) were classified as having relatively preserved inner and overt speech (n = 21), relatively preserved inner speech with poor overt speech (n = 8), or not classified due to insufficient measurements of inner and/or overt speech (n = 9). Inner speech scores (by group) were correlated with selected measures of language and cognition from the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (Swinburn, Porter, & Al, 2004). The group with poor overt speech showed a significant relationship of inner speech with overt naming (r = .95, p speech and language and cognition factors were not significant for the group with relatively good overt speech. As in previous research, we show that relatively preserved inner speech is found alongside otherwise severe production deficits in PWA. PWA with poor overt speech may rely more on preserved inner speech for overt picture naming (perhaps due to shared resources with verbal working memory) and for written picture description (perhaps due to reliance on inner speech due to perceived task difficulty). Assessments of inner speech may be useful as a standard component of aphasia screening, and therapy focused on improving and using inner speech may prove clinically worthwhile. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5303542.

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English, a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of…

Full Text Available This paper discusses the Speech and Phoneme Recognition as an Educational Aid for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired (SPREAD application and the ongoing research on its deployment as a tool for motivating deaf and hearing impaired students to learn and appreciate speech. This application uses the Sphinx-4 voice recognition system to analyze the vocalization of the student and provide prompt feedback on their pronunciation. The packaging of the application as an interactive game aims to provide additional motivation for the deaf and hearing impaired student through visual motivation for them to learn and appreciate speech.

, as opposed to a legal norm, that curbs exercises of the right to free speech that offend the feelings or beliefs of members from other cultural groups. The paper rejects the suggestion that acceptance of such a norm is in line with liberal egalitarian thinking. Following a review of the classical liberal...... egalitarian reasons for free speech - reasons from overall welfare, from autonomy and from respect for the equality of citizens - it is argued that these reasons outweigh the proposed reasons for curbing culturally offensive speech. Currently controversial cases such as that of the Danish Cartoon Controversy...

Moral dilemmas entail deciding whether to cause harm to maximize overall outcomes, such as killing 1 person to save 5. Past work has demonstrated that people are more willing to accept causing such outcome-maximizing harm when they read dilemmas in a foreign language they speak rather than their native language. Presumably this effect is due to…

Full Text Available This study attempts to describe the use of speech acts applied in primary school. This study is intended to identify the speech acts performed in primary school, to find the most dominant speech acts performed in elementary school, to give brief description of how speech acts applied in primary school, and to know how to apply the result of the study in English teaching learning to young learners. The speech acts performed in primary school is classified based on Searle‘s theory of speech acts. The most dominant speech acts performed in primary school is Directive (41.17%, the second speech act mostly performed is Declarative (33.33%, the third speech act mostly performed is Representative and Expressive (each 11.76%, and the least speech act performed is Commisive (1.9%. The speech acts performed in elementary school is applied on the context of situation determined by the National Education Standards Agency (BSNP. The speech acts performed in fourth grade have to be applied in the context of classroom, and the speech acts performed in fifth grade have to be applied in the context of school, whereas the speech acts performed in sixth grade have to be applied in the context of the students‘ surroundings. The result of this study is highy expected to give significant contribution to English teaching learning to young learners. By acknowledging the characteristics of young learners, the way they learn English as a foreign language, the teachers are expected to have inventive strategies and various techniques to create a fun and condusive atmosphere in English class.

Full Text Available Multiple reports have described patients with disordered articulation and prosody, often following acute aphasia, dysarthria, or apraxia of speech, which results in the perception by listeners of a foreign-like accent. These features led to the term foreign accent syndrome (FAS, a speech disorder with perceptual features that suggest an indistinct, non-native speaking accent. Also correctly known as psuedoforeign accent, the speech does not typically match a specific foreign accent, but is rather a constellation of speech features that result in the perception of a foreign accent by listeners. The primary etiologies of FAS are cerebrovascular accidents or traumatic brain injuries which affect cortical and subcortical regions critical to expressive speech and language production. Far fewer cases of FAS associated with psychiatric conditions have been reported. We will present the clinical history, neurological examination, neuropsychological assessment, cognitive-behavioral and biofeedback assessments, and motor speech examination of a patient with FAS without a known vascular, traumatic, or infectious precipitant. Repeated multidisciplinary examinations of this patient provided convergent evidence in support of FAS secondary to conversion disorder. We discuss these findings and their implications for evaluation and treatment of rare neurological and psychiatric conditions.

to business speeches. Consistent with the public opinion, our findings are indicative of Steve Jobs being a more charismatic speaker than Mark Zuckerberg. Beyond previous studies, our data suggest that rhythm and emphatic accentuation are also involved in conveying charisma. Furthermore, the differences...... between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and the investor- and customer-related sections of their speeches support the modern understanding of charisma as a gradual, multiparametric, and context-sensitive concept....

Thirty kindergarteners, 15 who substituted /w/ for /r/ and 15 with correct articulation, received two perception tests and a memory test that included /w/ and /r/ in minimally contrastive syllables. Although both groups had nearly perfect perception of the experimenter's productions of /w/ and /r/, misarticulating subjects perceived their own tape-recorded w/r productions as /w/. In the memory task these same misarticulating subjects committed significantly more /w/-/r/ confusions in unspoken recall. The discussion considers why people subvocally rehearse; a developmental period in which children do not rehearse; ways subvocalization may aid recall, including motor and acoustic encoding; an echoic store that provides additional recall support if subjects rehearse vocally, and perception of self- and other- produced phonemes by misarticulating children-including its relevance to a motor theory of perception. Evidence is presented that speech for memory can be sufficiently impaired to cause memory disorder. Conceptions that restrict speech disorder to an impairment of communication are challenged.

US Agency for International Development — ForeignAssistance.gov provides a view of U.S. Government foreign assistance funds across agencies and enables users to explore, analyze, and review aid investments...

Full Text Available ... the body. When your physician suspects that a blunt foreign body is stuck in the esophagus, you ... tract. Other drugs taken by mouth can help blunt foreign objects pass through the digestive tract by ...

Full Text Available ... foreign objects that have been ingested through the mouth or airway or introduced into the soft tissues. ... through the digestive tract. Other drugs taken by mouth can help blunt foreign objects pass through the ...

Full Text Available ... can leak into the bowel and cause mercury poisoning. Magnetic toys can obstruct the bowel when they ... soft tissue foreign body, contact your physician immediately. Treatment will depend on the type of foreign body ...

Full Text Available ... tissues. top of page What are some common uses of the procedure? Foreign body retrieval is used ... bones also may be difficult to visualize. Additional evaluation is required when the suspected foreign body is ...

US Agency for International Development — The Foreign Aid Explorer shows the multi-dimensional picture of U.S. foreign assistance through a highly visual and interactive website. The website makes it easy...

Full Text Available ... able to view the surgical instrument as it advances to the location of the foreign object in ... helps dilate, or widen, the esophagus. This helps advance the foreign body into the stomach, from where ...

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has given businesses powerful new First Amendment rights to advertise hazardous products. Most recently, in Lorillard Tobacco Co v Reilly (121 SCt 2404 [2001]), the court invalidated Massachusetts regulations intended to reduce underage smoking. The future prospects for commercial speech regulation appear dim, but the reasoning in commercial speech cases is supported by only a plurality of the court. A different First Amendment theory should recognize the importance of population health and the low value of corporate speech. In particular, a future court should consider the low informational value of tobacco advertising, the availability of alternative channels of communication, the unlawful practice of targeting minors, and the magnitude of the social harms. PMID:11867306

This study investigates French dyslexic and control adult participants' ability to perceive and produce two different non-native contrasts (one segmental and one prosodic), across several conditions varying short-term memory load. For this purpose, we selected Korean plosive voicing (whose categories conflict with French ones) as the segmental…

The speech-based envelope power spectrum model (sEPSM; [1]) was proposed in order to overcome the limitations of the classical speech transmission index (STI) and speech intelligibility index (SII). The sEPSM applies the signal-tonoise ratio in the envelope domain (SNRenv), which was demonstrated...... to successfully predict speech intelligibility in conditions with nonlinearly processed noisy speech, such as processing with spectral subtraction. Moreover, a multiresolution version (mr-sEPSM) was demonstrated to account for speech intelligibility in various conditions with stationary and fluctuating...

Prison institutional conditions affect risk for self-harm among detainees. In particular, prison overcrowding may increase the likelihood of self-harm by creating competition for resources, space, and enhancing a "deprivation state." The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between overcrowding and prisoner acts of self-harm. This cross-sectional study took place at Geneva's pre-trial prison (capacity:376) between 2006 and 2014. Outcomes were acts of self-harm that required medical attention, and self-strangulation/hanging events (combined into one group, as these are difficult to differentiate). Dichotomous predictors were overcrowding index- annual mean daily population divided by capacity ( > 200 percent vs prison change in gender, area of origin, foreign residency, religion, or psychiatric treatment. The present study is limited by the definition and identification of self-harm. The distinction between self-strangulation and self-hanging, and the precise classification of an intent to die is difficult to make in practice, especially with limited prison data records available. The relevant literature addresses the complexity of the association between non-suicidal and suicidal behavior. Despite this, the combined category self-strangulations/hangings gives some indication of severe self-harm events, especially since the methodology of categorization employed was consistent throughout the entire period of the study. Other limitations include the small sample size and the lack of individual patient data and prison data to help control for confounding factors. Despite these drawbacks, pertinent data (socio-demographics and number of prisoners treated for mental health and drug abuse) remained stable over the years. Thus, there are no apparent changes in the inmate population that could be linked to an increase in self-harm. High-security placements and mean prisoner stay have increased over time, with a decrease in staff to prisoner ratio - and these

A large variety of foreign bodies may be encountered in the external auditory meatus 1 . The objects may be organic or inorganic. Organic foreign bodies include paper, cotton wool, rubber, seeds, etc while inorganic objects include beads, ball bearings, stones, and crayons 1- 4. Foreign bodies are inserted into the ear.

This study examined music and speech perception in normal-hearing children with some or no musical training. Thirty children (mean age = 11.3 years), 15 with and 15 without formal music training participated in the study. Music perception was measured using a melodic contour identification (MCI) task; stimuli were a piano sample or sung speech with a fixed timbre (same word for each note) or a mixed timbre (different words for each note). Speech perception was measured in quiet and in steady noise using a matrix-styled sentence recognition task; stimuli were naturally intonated speech or sung speech with a fixed pitch (same note for each word) or a mixed pitch (different notes for each word). Significant musician advantages were observed for MCI and speech in noise but not for speech in quiet. MCI performance was significantly poorer with the mixed timbre stimuli. Speech performance in noise was significantly poorer with the fixed or mixed pitch stimuli than with spoken speech. Across all subjects, age at testing and MCI performance were significantly correlated with speech performance in noise. MCI and speech performance in quiet was significantly poorer for children than for adults from a related study using the same stimuli and tasks; speech performance in noise was significantly poorer for young than for older children. Long-term music training appeared to benefit melodic pitch perception and speech understanding in noise in these pediatric listeners.

Full Text Available The study of verbal behavior in a foreign language with the complex of methods of different sciences is the up-to-date task of scientific knowledge. The study of the ability to learn foreign languages is conducted with the help of psycholinguistic methods on the basis of contracted forms of communication, considering individual characteristics of speakers as well as level of their language culture, semantics and elements of their speech. The carried empirical study allows to say that there is the dependence of individual characteristics, motivation of communication, communicative skills of participants of communication and presence of various semantic and syntactic types of contracted forms in the dialogue.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-8-26

Although speech is the most natural form of communication between humans, most people find using speech to communicate with machines anything but natural. Drawing from psychology, human-computer interaction, linguistics, and communication theory, Practical Speech User Interface Design provides a comprehensive yet concise survey of practical speech user interface (SUI) design. It offers practice-based and research-based guidance on how to design effective, efficient, and pleasant speech applications that people can really use. Focusing on the design of speech user interfaces for IVR application

Full Text Available Conventional acoustic modeling involves estimating many parameters to effectively model feature distributions. The sparseness of speech and text data, however, degrades the reliability of the estimation process and makes speech recognition a...

Currently on the International Space Station (ISS) and other space vehicles Caution & Warning (C&W) alerts are represented with various auditory tones that correspond to the type of event. This system relies on the crew's ability to remember what each tone represents in a high stress, high workload environment when responding to the alert. Furthermore, crew receive a year or more in advance of the mission that makes remembering the semantic meaning of the alerts more difficult. The current system works for missions conducted close to Earth where ground operators can assist as needed. On long duration missions, however, they will need to work off-nominal events autonomously. There is evidence that speech alarms may be easier and faster to recognize, especially during an off-nominal event. The Information Presentation Directed Research Project (FY07-FY09) funded by the Human Research Program included several studies investigating C&W alerts. The studies evaluated tone alerts currently in use with NASA flight deck displays along with candidate speech alerts. A follow-on study used four types of speech alerts to investigate how quickly various types of auditory alerts with and without a speech component - either at the beginning or at the end of the tone - can be identified. Even though crew were familiar with the tone alert from training or direct mission experience, alerts starting with a speech component were identified faster than alerts starting with a tone. The current study replicated the results from the previous study in a more rigorous experimental design to determine if the candidate speech alarms are ready for transition to operations or if more research is needed. Four types of alarms (caution, warning, fire, and depressurization) were presented to participants in both tone and speech formats in laboratory settings and later in the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA). In the laboratory study, the alerts were presented by software and participants were

The purpose of this study is to examine speech intelligibility of children with primary speech and sound disorders aged 3 to 6 years in everyday life. The research problem is based on the degree to which parents or guardians, immediate family members (sister, brother, grandparents), extended family members (aunt, uncle, cousin), child's friends, other acquaintances, child's teachers and strangers understand the speech of children with speech sound disorders. We examined whether the level ...

Full Text Available This paper aims at discussing and analyzing the approach to speech acts in an EFL textbook series used in Brazilian public schools. In order to do that, the concepts of pragmatics and pragmatic competence, as well as their implications to foreign language (FL teaching, are discussed. Then, a brief review of the Speech Act Theory is presented. After describing the approach to FL teaching proposed by the PCNs and the selection of textbooks through the PNLD, we analyze one series, selected for the 2014-2016 triennium. The conclusion is that speech acts are not deeply approached, but that is in accordance with the goals of the series

The invention claims the bitumenization of biologically harmful wastes, such as industrial wastes containing radioactive materials. These wastes containing water are transported from sludge basins, this either by gravity or by mechanical stirrino. into a suitably adapted absorption zone or to several parallel zones filled with bitumen heated to 100 to 250 degC. An inert gas is forced into the system foaming the zone contents. The foam phase is decomposed by the action of heat while water is evaporated and condensed. Bitumen containing dry matter of the radioactive wastes is discharged from the bottom part of the absorption zone and stored in a tank. (Kr)

The Dutch parliament has recently accepted a tax law in which certain groups of alternative therapists can be exempt from VAT. To be eligible for this VAT exemption, the disciplines to which the therapists belong have to meet certain training requirements. In this article it is contended, in agreement with the Royal College of Physicians in the UK, that statutory regulation is inappropriate for disciplines whose therapies are neither of proved benefit nor appropriately tested. It legitimizes harmful therapies. This is illustrated by two serious accidents, previously described in this journal, caused by a chiropractor and a craniosacral therapist.

The notion that foreign aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) are complementary sources of capital is conventional among governments and international cooperation agencies. This paper argues that the notion is incomplete. Within the framework of an open economy Solow model we show...... that the theoretical relationship between foreign aid and FDI is indeterminate. Aid may raise the marginal productivity of capital by financing complementary inputs, such as public infrastructure projects and human capital investment. However, aid may also crowd out productive private investments if it comes...... in the shape of physical capital transfers. We therefore turn to an empirical analysis of the relationship between FDI and disaggregated aid flows. Our results strongly support the hypotheses that aid invested in complementary inputs draws in foreign capital while aid invested in physical capital crowds out...

Full Text Available The article reviews studies of speech disorders in schizophrenia. The authors paid attention to a historical course and characterization of studies of areas: the actual psychopathological (speech disorders as a psychopathological symptoms, their description and taxonomy, psychological (isolated neurons and pathopsychological perspective analysis separately analyzed some modern foreign works, covering a variety of approaches to the study of speech disorders in the endogenous mental disorders. Disorders and features of speech are among the most striking manifestations of schizophrenia along with impaired thinking (Savitskaya A. V., Mikirtumov B. E.. With all the variety of symptoms, speech disorders in schizophrenia could be classified and organized. The few clinical psychological studies of speech activity in schizophrenia presented work on the study of generation and standard speech utterance; features verbal associative process, speed parameters of speech utterances. Special attention is given to integrated research in the mainstream of biological psychiatry and genetic trends. It is shown that the topic for more than a half-century history of originality of speech pathology in schizophrenia has received some coverage in the psychiatric and psychological literature and continues to generate interest in the modern integrated multidisciplinary approach

In this paper we present a speech/non-speech classification method that allows high quality classification without the need to know in advance what kinds of audible non-speech events are present in an audio recording and that does not require a single parameter to be tuned on in-domain data. Because

Full Text Available The article deals with the study and analysis of comparable existing intensive methods of teaching foreign languages. This work is carried out to identify the positive and negative aspects of intensive methods of teaching foreign languages. The author traces the idea of rational organization and intensification of teaching foreign languages from their inception to the moment of their preparation in an integrated system. advantages and disadvantages of the most popular methods of intensive training also analyzed the characteristic of different historical periods, namely cugestopedichny method G. Lozanov method activation of reserve possibilities of students G. Kitaygorodskoy, emotional-semantic method I. Schechter, an intensive course of learning a foreign language L. Gegechkori , sugestokibernetichny integral method of accelerated learning a foreign language B. Petrusinskogo, a crash course in the study of spoken language by immersion A. Plesnevich. Analyzed the principles of learning and the role of each method in the development of methods of intensive foreign language training. The author identified a number of advantages and disadvantages of intensive methods of teaching foreign languages: 1 the assimilation of a large number of linguistic, lexical and grammatical units; 2 active use of acquired knowledge, skills and abilities in the practice of oral speech communication in a foreign language; 3 the ability to use language material resulting not only in his speech, but also in understanding the interlocutor; 4 overcoming psychological barriers, including fear of the possibility of making a mistake; 5 high efficiency and fast learning; 6 too much new language material that is presented; 7 training of oral forms of communication; 8 decline of grammatical units and models.

section includes four carefully selected chapters. They deal with facets of speech production, speech acoustics, and/or speech perception or recognition, place them in an integrated phonetic-phonological perspective, and relate them in more or less explicit ways to aspects of speech technology. Therefore......, we hope that this volume can help speech scientists with traditional training in phonetics and phonology to keep up with the latest developments in speech technology. In the opposite direction, speech researchers starting from a technological perspective will hopefully get inspired by reading about...... the questions, phenomena, and communicative functions that are currently addressed in phonetics and phonology. Either way, the future of speech research lies in international, interdisciplinary collaborations, and our volume is meant to reflect and facilitate such collaborations...

This study examines self-harm in a community sample of adolescents. More specifically, the study identifies the prevalence and types of self-harm, elucidates the nature and underlying function of self-harm, and evaluates the relation of psychological adjustment, sociodemographic, and health-risk variables to self-harm. Self-report questionnaires…

Foreign Investors Able to Establish Foreign-exclusively Exhibition Corporations In Feb, Ministry of Commerce issued its 1st decree on temporary regulation for foreign-investing corporations; the regulation allows foreign investors to set up foreign-investing convention & exhibition corporations exclusively or through cooperation with other Chinese corporations, enterprises or organizations. With legal protection on their regulatory management and legal rights, these foreign-investing corporations are in the charge of Department of Foreign Investment Administration, Ministry of Commerce.

Proper speech functioning in human being, depends on the precise coordination and timing balances in a series of complex neuro nuscular movements and actions. Starting from the prime organ of energy source of expelled air from respirato y system; deliver such air to trigger vocal cords; swift changes of this phonatory episode to a comprehensible sound in RESONACE and final coordination of all head and neck structures to elicit final speech in ...

The paper contains a transcript of a speech by the chairman of the UKAEA, to mark the publication of the 1985/6 annual report. The topics discussed in the speech include: the Chernobyl accident and its effect on public attitudes to nuclear power, management and disposal of radioactive waste, the operation of UKAEA as a trading fund, and the UKAEA development programmes. The development programmes include work on the following: fast reactor technology, thermal reactors, reactor safety, health and safety aspects of water cooled reactors, the Joint European Torus, and under-lying research. (U.K.)

Speech is both beautiful and informative. In this work, a conceptual study of the speech, through investigation of the tower of Babel, the archetypal phonemes, and a study of the reasons of uses of language is undertaken in order to create an artistic work investigating the nature of speech. The ....... The artwork is presented at the Re:New festival in May 2008....

Full Text Available Abstract Background Harm reduction refers to interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of health behaviors without necessarily extinguishing the problematic health behaviors completely. The vast majority of the harm reduction literature focuses on the harms of drug use and on specific harm reduction strategies, such as syringe exchange, rather than on the harm reduction philosophy as a whole. Given that a harm reduction approach can address other risk behaviors that often occur alongside drug use and that harm reduction principles have been applied to harms such as sex work, eating disorders, and tobacco use, a natural evolution of the harm reduction philosophy is to extend it to other health risk behaviors and to a broader healthcare audience. Methods Building on the extant literature, we used data from in-depth qualitative interviews with 23 patients and 17 staff members from an HIV clinic in the USA to describe harm reduction principles for use in healthcare settings. Results We defined six principles of harm reduction and generalized them for use in healthcare settings with patients beyond those who use illicit substances. The principles include humanism, pragmatism, individualism, autonomy, incrementalism, and accountability without termination. For each of these principles, we present a definition, a description of how healthcare providers can deliver interventions informed by the principle, and examples of how each principle may be applied in the healthcare setting. Conclusion This paper is one of the firsts to provide a comprehensive set of principles for universal harm reduction as a conceptual approach for healthcare provision. Applying harm reduction principles in healthcare settings may improve clinical care outcomes given that the quality of the provider-patient relationship is known to impact health outcomes and treatment adherence. Harm reduction can be a universal precaution applied to all individuals regardless of

Harm reduction refers to interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of health behaviors without necessarily extinguishing the problematic health behaviors completely. The vast majority of the harm reduction literature focuses on the harms of drug use and on specific harm reduction strategies, such as syringe exchange, rather than on the harm reduction philosophy as a whole. Given that a harm reduction approach can address other risk behaviors that often occur alongside drug use and that harm reduction principles have been applied to harms such as sex work, eating disorders, and tobacco use, a natural evolution of the harm reduction philosophy is to extend it to other health risk behaviors and to a broader healthcare audience. Building on the extant literature, we used data from in-depth qualitative interviews with 23 patients and 17 staff members from an HIV clinic in the USA to describe harm reduction principles for use in healthcare settings. We defined six principles of harm reduction and generalized them for use in healthcare settings with patients beyond those who use illicit substances. The principles include humanism, pragmatism, individualism, autonomy, incrementalism, and accountability without termination. For each of these principles, we present a definition, a description of how healthcare providers can deliver interventions informed by the principle, and examples of how each principle may be applied in the healthcare setting. This paper is one of the firsts to provide a comprehensive set of principles for universal harm reduction as a conceptual approach for healthcare provision. Applying harm reduction principles in healthcare settings may improve clinical care outcomes given that the quality of the provider-patient relationship is known to impact health outcomes and treatment adherence. Harm reduction can be a universal precaution applied to all individuals regardless of their disclosure of negative health behaviors, given that health

Recent findings have shown that people with higher musical aptitude were also better in oral language imitation tasks. However, whether singing capacity and instrument playing contribute differently to the imitation of speech has been ignored so far. Research has just recently started to understand that instrumentalists develop quite distinct skills when compared to vocalists. In the same vein the role of the vocal motor system in language acquisition processes has poorly been investigated as most investigations (neurobiological and behavioral) favor to examine speech perception. We set out to test whether the vocal motor system can influence an ability to learn, produce and perceive new languages by contrasting instrumentalists and vocalists. Therefore, we investigated 96 participants, 27 instrumentalists, 33 vocalists and 36 non-musicians/non-singers. They were tested for their abilities to imitate foreignspeech: unknown language (Hindi), second language (English) and their musical aptitude. Results revealed that both instrumentalists and vocalists have a higher ability to imitate unintelligible speech and foreign accents than non-musicians/non-singers. Within the musician group, vocalists outperformed instrumentalists significantly. First, adaptive plasticity for speech imitation is not reliant on audition alone but also on vocal-motor induced processes. Second, vocal flexibility of singers goes together with higher speech imitation aptitude. Third, vocal motor training, as of singers, may speed up foreign language acquisition processes.

Full Text Available The automatic recognition of foreign-accented Arabic speech is a challenging task since it involves a large number of nonnative accents. As well, the nonnative speech data available for training are generally insufficient. Moreover, as compared to other languages, the Arabic language has sparked a relatively small number of research efforts. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of nonnative speech in a speaker independent, large-vocabulary speech recognition system for modern standard Arabic (MSA. We analyze some major differences at the phonetic level in order to determine which phonemes have a significant part in the recognition performance for both native and nonnative speakers. Special attention is given to specific Arabic phonemes. The performance of an HMM-based Arabic speech recognition system is analyzed with respect to speaker gender and its native origin. The WestPoint modern standard Arabic database from the language data consortium (LDC and the hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK are used throughout all experiments. Our study shows that the best performance in the overall phoneme recognition is obtained when nonnative speakers are involved in both training and testing phases. This is not the case when a language model and phonetic lattice networks are incorporated in the system. At the phonetic level, the results show that female nonnative speakers perform better than nonnative male speakers, and that emphatic phonemes yield a significant decrease in performance when they are uttered by both male and female nonnative speakers.

Full Text Available The automatic recognition of foreign-accented Arabic speech is a challenging task since it involves a large number of nonnative accents. As well, the nonnative speech data available for training are generally insufficient. Moreover, as compared to other languages, the Arabic language has sparked a relatively small number of research efforts. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of nonnative speech in a speaker independent, large-vocabulary speech recognition system for modern standard Arabic (MSA. We analyze some major differences at the phonetic level in order to determine which phonemes have a significant part in the recognition performance for both native and nonnative speakers. Special attention is given to specific Arabic phonemes. The performance of an HMM-based Arabic speech recognition system is analyzed with respect to speaker gender and its native origin. The WestPoint modern standard Arabic database from the language data consortium (LDC and the hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK are used throughout all experiments. Our study shows that the best performance in the overall phoneme recognition is obtained when nonnative speakers are involved in both training and testing phases. This is not the case when a language model and phonetic lattice networks are incorporated in the system. At the phonetic level, the results show that female nonnative speakers perform better than nonnative male speakers, and that emphatic phonemes yield a significant decrease in performance when they are uttered by both male and female nonnative speakers.

Full Text Available This paper presents the case of a 33-year-old, right-handed, French-speaking Belgian lady who was involved in a car accident as a pedestrian. Six months after the incident she developed a German/Flemish-like accent. The patient’s medical history, the onset of the FAS and the possible psychological causes of the accent change are analyzed. Relevant neuropsychological, neurolinguistic and psychodiagnostic test results are presented and discussed. The psychodiagnostic interview and testing will receive special attention, because these have been underreported in previous FAS case reports. Furthermore, an accent rating experiment was carried out in order to assess the foreign quality of the patient’s speech. Pre- and post-morbid spontaneous speech samples were analyzed phonetically to identify the pronunciation characteristics associated with this type of FAS. Several findings were considered essential in the diagnosis of psychogenic FAS: the psychological assessments as well as the clinical interview confirmed the presence of psychological problems, while neurological damage was excluded by means of repeated neuroimaging and neurological examinations. The type and nature of the speech symptoms and the accent fluctuations associated with the patient's psychological state cannot be explained by a neurological disorder. Moreover, the indifference of the patient towards her condition may also suggest a psychogenic etiology, as the opposite is usually observed in neurogenic FAS patients.

The welcoming speech underlines the fact that any validation process starting with calculation methods and ending with studies on the long-term behaviour of a repository system can only be effected through laboratory, field and natural-analogue studies. The use of natural analogues (NA) is to secure the biosphere and to verify whether this safety really exists. (HP) [de

The masking effect of a piano composition, played at different speeds and in different octaves, on speech-perception thresholds was investigated in 15 normal-hearing and 14 moderately-hearing-impaired subjects. Running speech (just follow conversation, JFC) testing and use of hearing aids increased the everyday validity of the findings. A comparison was made with standard audiometric noises [International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) noise and speech spectrum-filtered noise (SPN)]. All masking sounds, music or noise, were presented at the same equivalent sound level (50 dBA). The results showed a significant effect of piano performance speed and octave (Ptempo had the largest effect; and high octave and slow tempo, the smallest. Music had a lower masking effect than did ICRA noise with two or six speakers at normal vocal effort (Pmusic offers an interesting opportunity for studying masking under realistic conditions, where spectral and temporal features can be varied independently. The results have implications for composing music with vocal parts, designing acoustic environments and creating a balance between speech perception and privacy in social settings.

Full Text Available The masking effect of a piano composition, played at different speeds and in different octaves, on speech-perception thresholds was investigated in 15 normal-hearing and 14 moderately-hearing-impaired subjects. Running speech (just follow conversation, JFC testing and use of hearing aids increased the everyday validity of the findings. A comparison was made with standard audiometric noises [International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA noise and speech spectrum-filtered noise (SPN]. All masking sounds, music or noise, were presented at the same equivalent sound level (50 dBA. The results showed a significant effect of piano performance speed and octave (Pspeech perception and privacy in social settings.

The seven articles in this collection deal with theoretical and practical freedom of speech issues. Topics covered are: the United States Supreme Court, motion picture censorship, and the color line; judicial decision making; the established scientific community's suppression of the ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky; the problems of avant-garde jazz,…

The First Amendment protects the speech of health care providers. This protection can limit states' abilities to protect patients from harmful therapies involving speech, such as sexual orientation change efforts. Because providers' speech is more similar to commercial speech than traditional political discourse, it is possible to create a First Amendment review analysis that better balances states' police powers with providers' First Amendment rights. Under a "single-prong" approach, the first prong of Central Hudson can be used to identify quackery, which is analogous to false or misleading commercial speech and would therefore be outside the protection of the First Amendment. Because health care must be tailored to individual patients, restrictions on speech that survive the first prong of Central Hudson would be subject to strict scrutiny in order to leave the therapeutic decision to the provider and her patient, and maintain consistency with current jurisprudence. This Comment examines litigation from California's attempted ban on sexual orientation change therapy to illustrate the conflicts created by the current approach to First Amendment review of health care provider speech. This Comment then demonstrates the benefit of the proposed single-prong approach, including how it simultaneously protects patients from harm while protecting health care providers' speech.

Full Text Available The acquisition of foreign language (FL vocabulary involves two aspects: (1 learning to recognize a word’s meaning, and (2 becoming able to retrieve or produce the word’s form in speech production. The second aspect usually takes more time and practice to be developed. While learners may have no problem understanding a FL word’s meaning, they frequently are unable to recall the word when necessary.

Full Text Available The Nobel Peace Prize has long been considered the premier peace prize in the world. According to Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Nobel Committee, of the 300 some peace prizes awarded worldwide, “none is in any way as well known and as highly respected as the Nobel Peace Prize” (Lundestad, 2001. Nobel peace speech is a unique and significant international site of public discourse committed to articulating the universal grammar of peace. Spanning over 100 years of sociopolitical history on the world stage, Nobel Peace Laureates richly represent an important cross-section of domestic and international issues increasingly germane to many publics. Communication scholars’ interest in this rhetorical genre has increased in the past decade. Yet, the norm has been to analyze a single speech artifact from a prestigious or controversial winner rather than examine the collection of speeches for generic commonalities of import. In this essay, we analyze the discourse of Nobel peace speech inductively and argue that the organizing principle of the Nobel peace speech genre is the repetitive form of normative liberal principles and values that function as rhetorical topoi. These topoi include freedom and justice and appeal to the inviolable, inborn right of human beings to exercise certain political and civil liberties and the expectation of equality of protection from totalitarian and tyrannical abuses. The significance of this essay to contemporary communication theory is to expand our theoretical understanding of rhetoric’s role in the maintenance and development of an international and cross-cultural vocabulary for the grammar of peace.

This book serves as a basic reference for those interested in the application of metaheuristics to speech enhancement. The major goal of the book is to explain the basic concepts of optimization methods and their use in heuristic optimization in speech enhancement to scientists, practicing engineers, and academic researchers in speech processing. The authors discuss why it has been a challenging problem for researchers to develop new enhancement algorithms that aid in the quality and intelligibility of degraded speech. They present powerful optimization methods to speech enhancement that can help to solve the noise reduction problems. Readers will be able to understand the fundamentals of speech processing as well as the optimization techniques, how the speech enhancement algorithms are implemented by utilizing optimization methods, and will be given the tools to develop new algorithms. The authors also provide a comprehensive literature survey regarding the topic.

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the problem of formation of cross-cultural competence of foreign students in the process of learning Ukrainian as a foreign language. Theoretical and pragmatic ways of intercultural communication methods for speakers of a foreign language in four types of speech activity have been substantiated. There have been determined linguistic and didactic principles of learning the Ukrainian language as a foreign language using authorial technology of interaction of different approaches that promotes the development of effective cross-cultural competence of foreign students. The main components of the innovative technology of work with foreign language audience have been characterized; a system of tasks and exercises aimed at mastering linguistic, socio-cultural and pragmatic competences has been set. There have been determined linguistic and methodical problems of comparative methodology, which authoring technology LTIRP with the usage of authentic texts is based on. Traditional and new forms, methods and techniques of teaching foreign students in the process of formation of cross-cultural competence have been considered.

Nowadays people are using more and more social networks to communicate their opinions, share information and experiences. In social networks people have the feeling of being deindividualized and can incur more frequently in aggressive communication. In this context, it is important that government and social networks platforms have tools to detect hate speech because it is harmful to its targets. In our work we investigate the problem of detecting hate speech online. Our first goal is to make...

The main objective of this research was to test an authentic-speech technique for improving the sound-recognition skills of EFL (English as a foreign language) students at Roi-Et Rajabhat University. The secondary objective was to determine the correlation, if any, between students' self-evaluation of sound-recognition progress and the actual…

With the spread of mobile devices, mobile phones have enormous potential regarding their pedagogical use in language education. The goal of this study is to analyse user experience of a mobile-based learning system that is enhanced by speech recognition technology for the improvement of EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' speaking…

This study examined the use of speech recognition (SR) technology to support a group of elementary school children's learning of English as a foreign language (EFL). SR technology has been used in various language learning contexts. Its application to EFL teaching and learning is still relatively recent, but a solid understanding of its…

People who are street involved such as those experiencing homelessness and drug use face multiple inequities in health and access to health care. Morbidity and mortality are significantly increased among those who are street involved. Incorporation of a harm reduction philosophy in health care has the potential to shift the moral context of health care delivery and enhance access to health care services. However, harm reduction with a primary focus on reducing the harms of drug use fails focus on the harms associated with the context of drug use such as homelessness, violence and poverty. Ethical analysis of the underlying values of harm reduction and examination of different conceptions of justice are discussed as a basis for action that addresses a broad range of harms associated with drug use. Theories of distributive justice that focus primarily on the distribution of material goods are limited as theoretical frameworks for addressing the root causes of harm associated with drug use. Social justice, reconceptualised and interpreted through a critical lens as described by Iris Marion Young, is presented as a promising alternative ethical framework. A critical reinterpretation of social justice leads to insights that can illuminate structural inequities that contribute to the harms associated with the context of drug use. Such an approach provides promise as means of informing policy that aims to reduce a broad range of harms associated with drug use such as homelessness and poverty.

... to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your physician also may locate soft-tissue objects by probing the wound. Additional tests ... magnets pulling together parts of bowel. Removal of soft-tissue foreign bodies will ... provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding ...

Full Text Available ... to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your physician also may locate soft-tissue objects by probing the wound. Additional tests ... magnets pulling together parts of bowel. Removal of soft-tissue foreign bodies will ... provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding ...

@@ New procedures will help facilitate mergers and acquisitions by foreign companies in China The State Council, or China's cabinet, said in a February statement that China will establish a ministerial panel to review foreign firms' attempts to buy, or merge with, domestic companies.

New procedures will help facilitate mergers and acquisitions by foreign companies in China The State Council,or China’s cabinet,said in a February statement that China will establish a ministerial panel to review foreign firms’ attempts to buy,or merge with,domestic companies.The committee, led by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is typically described as a motor-speech disorder with clinically well-defined symptoms, but without a clear understanding of the underlying problems in motor control. A number of studies have compared the speech of subjects with AOS to the fluent speech of controls, but only a few have included speech movement data and if…

to the firm?s productivity. Foreign-owned firms have, on average, higher productivity in equilibrium due to entry costs, which means that low-productivity foreign firms cannot enter. Foreign firms have higher wage growth and, with some exceptions, pay higher average wages, but not when compared to similarly...... large domestic firms. The empirical implications of the model are tested on matched employer-employee data from Denmark. Consistent with the theory, we find considerable evidence of higher wages and wage growth in large and/or foreign-owned firms. These effects survive controlling for individual...... characteristics, but, as expected, are reduced significantly when controlling for unobservable firm heterogeneity. Furthermore, acquired skills in foreign-owned and large firms appear to be transferable to both subsequent wage work and self-employment...

Full Text Available The article analyzes domestic and foreign researches in the field of combustion gas cleaning from harmful matters. The drawbacks of the existing methods of cleaning emissions of small-capacity boilers are revealed. The results of the researches conducted by the authors are presented. Complex schemes of cleaning emissions of the industrial boilers of the DKVR series are considered. The results of the tests of afterburning devices installed in the industrial boilers are presented. The simplest design of an afterburning device by the example of an industrial boiler of the DKVR series is considered. It is shown that the application of the afterburning devices prevents emissions of the incomplete burning products (CO, carbon black, benzpyrene and reduces the nitric oxide content by (50-80%, depending on the scheme of cleaning. The usage of the afterburning devices improves boiler performance owing to the increase of the radiant component in a furnace chamber, reduction of heat losses, increase of efficiency.

The performance of automatic speech recognition based on coded-decoded speech heavily depends on the quality of the transmitted signals, determined by channel impairments. This paper examines relationships between speech recognition performance and measurements of speech quality and intelligibility

'Realism in Foreign Policy Analysis' traces how realist thinking on foreign policy has developed over the years and discusses the challenges and opportunities faced by various strands of realism when applied to foreign policy analysis....

Tanning for cosmetic purposes by sunbathing or by using artificial tanning devices is widespread. The hazards associated with exposure to ultraviolet radiation are of concern to the medical profession. Depending on the amount and form of the radiation, as well as on the skin type of the individual exposed, ultraviolet radiation causes erythema, sunburn, photodamage (photoaging), photocarcinogenesis, damage to the eyes, alteration of the immune system of the skin, and chemical hypersensitivity. Skin cancers most commonly produced by ultraviolet radiation are basal and squamous cell carcinomas. There also is much circumstantial evidence that the increase in the incidence of cutaneous malignant melanoma during the past half century is related to increased sun exposure, but this has not been proved. Effective and cosmetically acceptable sunscreen preparations have been developed that can do much to prevent or reduce most harmful effects to ultraviolet radiation if they are applied properly and consistently. Other safety measures include (1) minimizing exposure to ultraviolet radiation, (2) being aware of reflective surfaces while in the sun, (3) wearing protective clothing, (4) avoiding use of artificial tanning devices, and (5) protecting infants and children

Incarcerated populations across the world have been found to be consistently and significantly more vulnerable to problem gambling than general populations in the same countries. In an effort to gain a more specific understanding of this vulnerability the present study applied latent class analysis and criminal career theory to gambling data collected from a sample of English and Scottish, male and female prisoners (N = 1057). Theoretical links between gambling and crime were tested through three hypotheses: (1) that prisoners in the UK would have higher rates of problem gambling behaviour than the national population; (2) that if the link between gambling and crime is coincidental, gambling behaviour would be highly prevalent in an offending population, and (3) if connections between gambling behaviour and offending are co-symptomatic a mediating factor would show a strong association. The first of these was supported, the second was not supported and the third was partially supported. Latent class analysis found six gambling behaviour clusters measured by responses to the Problem Gambling Severity Index, primarily distinguished by loss chasing behaviour. Longitudinal offending data drawn from the Police National Computer database found four criminal career types, distinguished by frequency and persistence over time. A significant association was found between higher level loss chasing and high rate offending in criminal careers suggesting that impulse control may be a mediating factor for both gambling harm and criminal careers.

on the supply side. The present article reports on a new public action strategy which has taken shape in the course of 2013-14. While Denmark is a small language area, our public sector is well organised and has considerable purchasing power. Across this past year, Danish local authorities have organised around......Most of the Danish municipalities are ready to begin to adopt automatic speech recognition, but at the same time remain nervous following a long series of bad business cases in the recent past. Complaints are voiced over costly licences and low service levels, typical effects of a de facto monopoly...... the speech technology challenge, they have formulated a number of joint questions and new requirements to be met by suppliers and have deliberately worked towards formulating tendering material which will allow fair competition. Public researchers have contributed to this work, including the author...

Scientific advances can improve the lives of adults with intellectual disability, yet concerns that research participation may impose harm impede scientific progress. What counts as harmful can be subjective and perceptions of harm may vary among stakeholders. We studied perspectives on the harmfulness of research events among adults with intellectual disability, family members and friends, disability service providers, researchers, and Institutional Review Board members. We found considerable variance. For example, adults with intellectual disability see exclusion from research as more harmful, but most psychosocial harms as less significant than others. All stakeholders agree that having someone else make the participation decision is harmful. Findings provide insights into the concept of harm and ethical research with adults with intellectual disability. PMID:28095059

The aim of this multicenter clinical field study was to assess the benefits of the new Freedom 24 sound processor for cochlear implant (CI) users implanted with the Nucleus 24 cochlear implant system. The study included 48 postlingually profoundly deaf experienced CI users who demonstrated speech comprehension performance with their current speech processor on the Oldenburg sentence test (OLSA) in quiet conditions of at least 80% correct scores and who were able to perform adaptive speech threshold testing using the OLSA in noisy conditions. Following baseline measures of speech comprehension performance with their current speech processor, subjects were upgraded to the Freedom 24 speech processor. After a take-home trial period of at least 2 weeks, subject performance was evaluated by measuring the speech reception threshold with the Freiburg multisyllabic word test and speech intelligibility with the Freiburg monosyllabic word test at 50 dB and 70 dB in the sound field. The results demonstrated highly significant benefits for speech comprehension with the new speech processor. Significant benefits for speech comprehension were also demonstrated with the new speech processor when tested in competing background noise.In contrast, use of the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB) did not prove to be a suitably sensitive assessment tool for comparative subjective self-assessment of hearing benefits with each processor. Use of the preprocessing algorithm known as adaptive dynamic range optimization (ADRO) in the Freedom 24 led to additional improvements over the standard upgrade map for speech comprehension in quiet and showed equivalent performance in noise. Through use of the preprocessing beam-forming algorithm BEAM, subjects demonstrated a highly significant improved signal-to-noise ratio for speech comprehension thresholds (i.e., signal-to-noise ratio for 50% speech comprehension scores) when tested with an adaptive procedure using the Oldenburg

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a picture naming task of simple and complex words in children with typical speech and with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Results reveal reduced amplitude prior to speaking complex (multisyllabic) words relative to simple (monosyllabic) words for the CAS group over the right hemisphere during a time window thought to reflect phonological encoding of word forms. Group differences were also observed prior to production of spoken tokens regardless of word complexity during a time window just prior to speech onset (thought to reflect motor planning/programming). Results suggest differences in pre-speech neurolinguistic processes.

exaggerates benefits, participation is directly recommended, and the harms are downplayed or left out, despite agreement that the objective is informed choice. This raises an ethical discussion concerning autonomy versus paternalism, and the difficulty in weighing benefits against harms. Finally, financial...

the personal network of the drinker and lead to secondary traumatization. This can appear as emotional distress, financial difficulties and lead to domestic violence and in some cases self-harm and suicide. This interplay between alcohol and self-harm was investigated in individuals, families and communities...

Chronic use at high dose of illicit drugs, alcohol and tobacco is associated with physical disease. The relative physical harm of these substances has not been described before, but will benefit the guiding of policy measures about licit and illicit substances. The physical harm of 19 addictive

Non-language speech sounds (NLSS) are sounds produced by humans that do not carry linguistic information. Examples of these sounds are coughs, clicks, breaths, and filled pauses such as "uh" and "um" in English. NLSS are prominent in conversational speech, but can be a significant source of errors in speech processing applications. Traditionally, these sounds are ignored by speech endpoint detection algorithms, where speech regions are identified in the audio signal prior to processing. The ability to filter NLSS as a pre-processing step can significantly enhance the performance of many speech processing applications, such as speaker identification, language identification, and automatic speech recognition. In order to be used in all such applications, NLSS detection must be performed without the use of language models that provide knowledge of the phonology and lexical structure of speech. This is especially relevant to situations where the languages used in the audio are not known apriori. We present the results of preliminary experiments using data from American and British English speakers, in which segments of audio are classified as language speech sounds (LSS) or NLSS using a set of acoustic features designed for language-agnostic NLSS detection and a hidden-Markov model (HMM) to model speech generation. The results of these experiments indicate that the features and model used are capable of detection certain types of NLSS, such as breaths and clicks, while detection of other types of NLSS such as filled pauses will require future research.

An esophageal foreign body is the term for a foreign body in the esophagus. The 2 age groups most prone to this condition are children age 9 and under (and especially toddlers age 4 and under) and elderly individuals age 70 and over. A foreign body often lodges where the esophagus is most constricted. In toddlers, the foreign body is often currency or coins or a toy. In adults, the body is often a piece of fish, dentures, a piece of meat, a pin or needle, or a drug in its blister pack packaging. In children, an esophageal foreign body is treated by fluoroscopically guided removal of the body with a balloon catheter or magnetic catheter or removal of the body via endoscopy or direct esophagoscopy under general anesthesia. In adults, the best choice for treating an esophageal foreign body is removing the body with an endoscope but there are instances where surgery is performed because the body is hard to remove endoscopically, a puncture has occurred, or empyema or mediastinitis has developed. This paper reviews the diagnosis and treatment of an esophageal foreign body.

The harmful practices discussed in this article are based on case histories form the Central Maternity in Niamey, yet these practices universally affect women throughout Africa. Nutritional taboos are aimed at certain diseases such as measles, diarrhea, dysentery, malnutrition and anemia and consumption of foods rich in proteins and lipids are forbidden. Children are forbidden from eating eggs; pregnant women are forbidden from eating fruits and vegetables because of the fear of hemorrhaging from the sugar content in the fruit; camel meat is forbidden for fear of extending the pregnancy. Female circumcision, a dangerous practice, especially during childbirth, causes many medical problems that remain permanent. Adolescent pregnancy and marriages are practiced to avoid delinquency among children; yet such practices take place because of arranged marriages for a dowry to young men or to older rich men and these forced marriages to adolescents are the causes of increases in divorce, prostitution and desertion. These young marriages have serious consequences on the health status of the mother and the infant, often leading to maternal and infant death. The high level of fertility in Niger is a response to the social structure of the family. It is a patrilineal system that encourages women to have many children, especially sons. In Niger, pregnancy is surrounded by supernatural and mysterious forces, where a child is the intervention for ancestral spirits. In Islam a child is considered a "Gift of God". A woman is expected to work until the delivery of her baby otherwise she is jeered by her neighbors. During delivery women are not expected to cry or show any pain for fear of dishonoring her family irregardless of any medical compilations she faces. Women in Africa are exploited as free labor, deteriorate and age rapidly, are generally illiterate and are not protected under any laws.

Tom Regan encapsulated his principle of harm as a prima facie direct duty not to harm experiencing subjects of a life. However, his consideration of harm as deprivation, one example of which is loss of freedom, can easily be interpreted as a harm, which may not be experienced by its subject....... This creates a gap between Regan’s criterion for moral status and his account of what our duties are. However, in comparison with three basic paradigms of welfare known in nonhuman animal welfare science, Regan’s understanding coheres with a modified version of a feelings-based paradigm: not only the immediate...... feelings of satisfaction, but also future opportunities to have such feelings, must be taken into account. Such an interpretation is compatible with Regan’s understanding of harm as deprivation. The potential source of confusion, however, lies in Regan’s own possible argumentative mistakes....

In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative study that gathered Nicaraguans' perceptions of short-term foreign medical missions, towards deepening the understanding of what Nicaraguans value or find limited in the work of such foreign missions operating in their country. Fifty-two interviews were conducted with patients, relatives of patients, Nicaraguan physicians and nurses who partnered with or observed missions at work, 'beneficiary' community leaders, and individuals who were unable or unwilling to access mission-provided healthcare. Factors underlying participants' positive and more critical accounts of foreign primary and surgical missions are described and analysed. Empirical investigation on how, whether or not, or on what bases short-term medical missions (STMs) have been perceived as beneficial, harmful, or otherwise by those on the receiving end of these efforts is limited. This study aims to contribute to the evidence base for reflecting on the ethical performance of trans-national STMs.

in the mobile context covering motivations, challenges, fundamental techniques and applications. Three ASR architectures are introduced: embedded speech recognition, distributed speech recognition and network speech recognition. Their pros and cons and implementation issues are discussed. Applications within......The enthusiasm of deploying automatic speech recognition (ASR) on mobile devices is driven both by remarkable advances in ASR technology and by the demand for efficient user interfaces on such devices as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). This chapter presents an overview of ASR...

A 4-day inservice teacher workshop, held so that teachers from a number of countries could share ideas and experiences about foreign language teaching at the elementary school level, is described. Speeches and events of each day are summarized briefly, and plenary sessions are chronicled in somewhat more detail. The latter include: a description…

This article focuses on the teaching of pragmatics in the Spanish as a Foreign Language classroom and examines the role of grammar as a communicative resource. It also aims to highlight the importance of teaching pragmatics from beginning levels of language instruction, with the spotlight on speech acts at the discourse level. After the concept of…

su esquema conceptual más en el orden de lo institucional-pedagógico que en el orden gramatical. Enfatizando el análisis en las relaciones binarias de discurso y cognición, pragmática e ideología. The transformation process occurring in the educational field, which has resulted from the generalized development and application of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT, differs from preceding technological revolutions in the amazingly accelerated pace it sets. Reflecting upon the implications of the generalized and increasing adoption of ICT is undeniably important for the present and future of social sciences and, particularly, for the areas of pedagogy and didactics. This study does not only attempt to establish those implications formally foreseeable in terms of efficacy and effectiveness resulting from the use of ICT to teach foreign languages –first order, but also to determine how much this function tends to transform the roles of participants –second order implications. The latter includes the teachers, the institution they belong to and the degree of awareness existing upon those phenomena. The research study aims at making evident what the use of ICT for language teaching is as seen from a critical discourse analysis of the university professors’ speech. It does not show a direct application of Teun Van Dijk’s discourse analysis method, but rather an adaptation which emphasizes the implementation of the conceptual framework in institutional-pedagogic terms than in grammar terms, therefore highlighting the analysis of the binary relationships existing between discourse and cognition and pragmatics and ideology.

Full Text Available ... may become lodged in the esophagus and cause pain, even though they are able to swallow. Larger ... the stomach or intestines can cause severe abdominal pain, fever, fainting and shock. Foreign bodies in the ...

Full Text Available ... taking and allergies, especially to iodinated contrast materials. Leave jewelry at home and wear loose, comfortable clothing. ... blood vessels, so your physician may choose to leave it in place. The majority of foreign bodies ...

Full Text Available ... tissue, such as a splinter embedded under the skin, you may undergo an ultrasound, x-ray or ... that gets embedded in the tissue under the skin. Soft tissue foreign bodies can cause infection and ...

Full Text Available ... digestive tract. Other drugs taken by mouth can help blunt foreign objects pass through the digestive tract ... a thin tube that can be used to help trap smooth objects like a marble, or to ...

Full Text Available ... into the soft tissues. Commonly swallowed objects include coins, buttons, pins, nails, glass pieces, toothpicks, batteries, small ... or a special detector. Many foreign bodies, like coins and batteries, are radio-opaque, meaning that x- ...

Full Text Available ... saved. Using an ultrasound transducer to visualize the location of the object, the physician may make an ... the surgical instrument as it advances to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your ...

Full Text Available ... in the esophagus, you may receive an intravenous drug to relax the esophagus and allow the object to pass through the digestive tract. Other drugs taken by mouth can help blunt foreign objects ...

Full Text Available ... small toys or pieces of toys and fish bones. Swallowing of magnets can cause significant problems including ... like toothpicks. Small esophageal foreign bodies like fish bones also may be difficult to visualize. Additional evaluation ...

Full Text Available ... extended over the patient while an x-ray film holder or image recording plate is placed beneath ... through the body, recording an image on photographic film or a special detector. Many foreign bodies, like ...

Full Text Available ... the large intestine, causing cramps, bloating, loss of appetite, vomiting, and sometimes fever. A sharp object that ... top of page What are the benefits vs. risks? Benefits Removal of a foreign body will reduce ...

Full Text Available ... pregnant. Many imaging tests are not performed during pregnancy so as not to expose the fetus to ... See the Safety page for more information about pregnancy and x-rays. If the foreign body is ...

Full Text Available ... only 10 to 20 percent of the time. Evaluation and treatment will depend on the type of ... bones also may be difficult to visualize. Additional evaluation is required when the suspected foreign body is ...

Full Text Available ... batteries, small toys or pieces of toys and fish bones. Swallowing of magnets can cause significant problems ... bodies like toothpicks. Small esophageal foreign bodies like fish bones also may be difficult to visualize. Additional ...

Full Text Available ... two snares. The catheter is guided into place just beyond the foreign object using x-ray fluoroscopy. ... perform surgery using ultrasound guidance. Ultrasound provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding ...

Full Text Available ... recording an image on photographic film or a special detector. Many foreign bodies, like coins and batteries, ... or white on x-ray. Fluoroscopy is a special x-ray technique that makes it possible to ...

Full Text Available ... include coins, buttons, pins, nails, glass pieces, toothpicks, batteries, small toys or pieces of toys and fish ... foreign body ingestions. Sometimes problems occur when button batteries are swallowed as mercury within the batteries can ...

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce — The Foreign Data Library consists of meteorological data from nations other than the United States. The data are on original observational forms, in publications,...

Full Text Available ... related to Foreign Body Retrieval Sponsored by Please note RadiologyInfo.org is not a medical facility. Please ... is further reviewed by committees from the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the Radiological Society of ...

Full Text Available ... pieces of toys and fish bones. Swallowing of magnets can cause significant problems including bowel blockages that may require surgical removal of magnets. Children account for about 80 percent of foreign ...

Full Text Available ... tissues. top of page What are some common uses of the procedure? Foreign body retrieval is used ... community, you can search the ACR-accredited facilities database . This website does not provide cost information. The ...

Full Text Available ... as infection. top of page What are the benefits vs. risks? Benefits Removal of a foreign body will reduce your ... cancer from excessive exposure to radiation. However, the benefit of an accurate diagnosis far outweighs the risk. ...

Full Text Available ... especially to iodinated contrast materials. Leave jewelry at home and wear loose, comfortable clothing. You may be ... relative or friend accompany you and drive you home afterward. Foreign bodies are typically dealt with in ...

Foreign material is any element that is not part of the system as it has been designed. For example dirt, loose parts, wires, chips, etc. that may affect the operation of the system or component. (Author)

Full Text Available ... bodies. top of page How does the procedure work? Your physician may use an x-ray or ... not a bowel obstruction from the magnets pulling together parts of bowel. Removal of soft-tissue foreign ...

Full Text Available ... that may require surgical removal of magnets. Children account for about 80 percent of foreign body ingestions. ... anesthesia) and no IV. top of page Additional Information and Resources Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) - Patient ...

Full Text Available ... stuck in their throat or esophagus. Drooling and difficulty swallowing are common symptoms. A small sharp object ... able to view the surgical instrument as it advances to the location of the foreign object in ...

Full Text Available ... you ingest a foreign body or witness a child ingest one or suspect the presence of a ... have special pediatric considerations. The teddy bear denotes child-specific content. Related Articles and Media Computed Tomography ( ...

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are trained to correct articulation of people diagnosed with motor speech disorders by analyzing articulators' motion and assessing speech outcome while patients speak. To assist SLPs in this task, we are presenting the multimodal speech capture system (MSCS) that records and displays kinematics of key speech articulators, the tongue and lips, along with voice, using unobtrusive methods. Collected speech modalities, tongue motion, lips gestures, and voice are visualized not only in real-time to provide patients with instant feedback but also offline to allow SLPs to perform post-analysis of articulators' motion, particularly the tongue, with its prominent but hardly visible role in articulation. We describe the MSCS hardware and software components, and demonstrate its basic visualization capabilities by a healthy individual repeating the words "Hello World." A proof-of-concept prototype has been successfully developed for this purpose, and will be used in future clinical studies to evaluate its potential impact on accelerating speech rehabilitation by enabling patients to speak naturally. Pattern matching algorithms to be applied to the collected data can provide patients with quantitative and objective feedback on their speech performance, unlike current methods that are mostly subjective, and may vary from one SLP to another.

Assistive speech-enabled systems are proposed to help both French and English speaking persons with various speech disorders. The proposed assistive systems use automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis in order to enhance the quality of communication. These systems aim at improving the intelligibility of pathologic speech making it as natural as possible and close to the original voice of the speaker. The resynthesized utterances use new basic units, a new concatenating algorithm and a grafting technique to correct the poorly pronounced phonemes. The ASR responses are uttered by the new speech synthesis system in order to convey an intelligible message to listeners. Experiments involving four American speakers with severe dysarthria and two Acadian French speakers with sound substitution disorders (SSDs) are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods. An improvement of the Perceptual Evaluation of the Speech Quality (PESQ) value of 5% and more than 20% is achieved by the speech synthesis systems that deal with SSD and dysarthria, respectively.

Speech perception is inherently multimodal. Visual speech (lip-reading) information is used by all perceivers and readily integrates with auditory speech. Imaging research suggests that the brain treats auditory and visual speech similarly. These findings have led some researchers to consider that speech perception works by extracting amodal information that takes the same form across modalities. From this perspective, speech integration is a property of the input information itself. Amodal s...

Full Text Available Esophageal foreign body aspiration is a common event which can cause serious morbidity and mortality in the children and adult population. For that reason, early diagnosis and treatment are crucial for preventing these life threateining complications. Children most often ingest coins and toys whereas adults commonly tend to have problems with meat and bones. Esophageal foreign bodies are located at the cricopharyngeus muscle level in 70%, the thoracic esophagus in 15% and the gastroesophageal junction in the remaining 15%. Symptoms can vary according to the shape and structure of the ingested object, type of location, patient%u2019s age and complications caused by the foreign body. Delay in treatment, esophageal perforation and an underlying esophageal disease are poor prognostic factors. In treatment, observation, foley catheter, rigid or flexible esophagoscopy and removing the foreign body with a Magill forceps, pushing the foreign body into the stomach, giving intravenous glucagon and surgical treatment methods can be used. Rigid esophagoscopy is an effective and safe procedure for foreign body diagnosis and removal. Improved endoscopic experience and clinical management of thoracic surgeons led to reduced morbidity and mortality in recent years. Most of those emergencies of childhood are preventable. Family education is very important.

Laryngeal foreign bodies in adults are rare. The foreign bodies accidentally entering the larynx are symptomatic in the form of choking , stridor or even death. We are presenting a rare case of foreign body in the larynx in a 42 year old male who was symptom free except for dysphonia. The foreign body was removed successfully under local anesthesia.

Full Text Available In this paper I argue that pragmatic ability must become part of what we teach in the classroom if we are to realize the goals of communicative competence for our students. I review the research on pragmatics, especially those articles that point to the effectiveness of teaching pragmatics in an explicit manner, and those that posit methods for teaching. I also note two areas of scholarship that address classroom needs—the use of authentic data and appropriate assessment tools. The essay concludes with a summary of my own experience teaching speech acts in an advanced-level Portuguese class.

The authors sought to identify risk factors for repeat self-harm and completed suicide over the following year among adults with deliberate self-harm. A national cohort of Medicaid-financed adults clinically diagnosed with deliberate self-harm (N=61,297) was followed for up to 1 year. Repeat self-harm per 1,000 person-years and suicide rates per 100,000 person-years (based on cause of death information from the National Death Index) were determined. Hazard ratios of repeat self-harm and suicide were estimated by Cox proportional hazard models. During the 12 months after nonfatal self-harm, the rate of repeat self-harm was 263.2 per 1,000 person-years and the rate of completed suicide was 439.1 per 100,000 person-years, or 37.2 times higher than in a matched general population cohort. The hazard of suicide was higher after initial self-harm events involving violent as compared with nonviolent methods (hazard ratio=7.5, 95% CI=5.5-10.1), especially firearms (hazard ratio=15.86, 95% CI=10.7-23.4; computed with poisoning as reference), and to a lesser extent after events of patients who had recently received outpatient mental health care (hazard ratio=1.6, 95% CI=1.2-2.0). Compared with self-harm patients using nonviolent methods, those who used violent methods were at significantly increased risk of suicide during the first 30 days after the initial event (hazard ratio=17.5, 95% CI=11.2-27.3), but not during the following 335 days. Adults treated for deliberate self-harm frequently repeat self-harm in the following year. Patients who use a violent method for their initial self-harm, especially firearms, have an exceptionally high risk of suicide, particularly right after the initial event, which highlights the importance of careful assessment and close follow-up of this group.

Using a computerized content analysis, the authors demonstrate changes in speech behaviors of prison inmates. They conclude that two to four hours of public speaking training can have only limited effect on students who live in a culture in which "prison speech" is the expected and rewarded form of behavior. (PD)

a method for underdetermined blind source separation of convolutive mixtures. The proposed framework is applicable for separation of instantaneous as well as convolutive speech mixtures. It is possible to iteratively extract each speech signal from the mixture by combining blind source separation...

Some of the history of gradual infusion of the modulation spectrum concept into Automatic recognition of speech (ASR) comes next, pointing to the relationship of modulation spectrum processing to wellaccepted ASR techniques such as dynamic speech features or RelAtive SpecTrAl (RASTA) ﬁltering. Next, the frequency ...

Persons with cerebellar ataxia exhibit changes in physical coordination and speech and voice production. Previously, these alterations of speech and voice production were described primarily via perceptual coordinates. In this study, the spatial-temporal properties of syllable production were examined in 12 speakers, six of whom were healthy…

This PhD thesis in human-computer interfaces (informatics) studies the case of the anaesthesia record used during medical operations and the possibility to supplement it with speech recognition facilities. Problems and limitations have been identified with the traditional paper-based anaesthesia...... and inaccuracies in the anaesthesia record. Supplementing the electronic anaesthesia record interface with speech input facilities is proposed as one possible solution to a part of the problem. The testing of the various hypotheses has involved the development of a prototype of an electronic anaesthesia record...... interface with speech input facilities in Danish. The evaluation of the new interface was carried out in a full-scale anaesthesia simulator. This has been complemented by laboratory experiments on several aspects of speech recognition for this type of use, e.g. the effects of noise on speech recognition...

The present study examined whether processing words with affective connotations in a listener's native language may be modulated by accented speech. To address this question, we used the Event Related Potential (ERP) technique and recorded the cerebral activity of Spanish native listeners, who performed a semantic categorization task, while listening to positive, negative and neutral words produced in standard Spanish or in four foreign accents. The behavioral results yielded longer latencies for emotional than for neutral words in both native and foreign-accented speech, with no difference between positive and negative words. The electrophysiological results replicated previous findings from the emotional language literature, with the amplitude of the Late Positive Complex (LPC), associated with emotional language processing, being larger (more positive) for emotional than for neutral words at posterior scalp sites. Interestingly, foreign-accented speech was found to interfere with the processing of positive valence and go along with a negativity bias, possibly suggesting heightened attention to negative words. The manipulation employed in the present study provides an interesting perspective on the effects of accented speech on processing affective-laden information. It shows that higher order semantic processes that involve emotion-related aspects are sensitive to a speaker's accent. PMID:25870577

Full Text Available One of the major problems concerning the evolution of human language is to understand how sounds became associated to meaningful gestures. It has been proposed that the circuit controlling gestures and speech evolved from a circuit involved in the control of arm and mouth movements related to ingestion. This circuit contributed to the evolution of spoken language, moving from a system of communication based on arm gestures. The discovery of the mirror neurons has provided strong support for the gestural theory of speech origin because they offer a natural substrate for the embodiment of language and create a direct link between sender and receiver of a message. Behavioural studies indicate that manual gestures are linked to mouth movements used for syllable emission. Grasping with the hand selectively affected movement of inner or outer parts of the mouth according to syllable pronunciation and hand postures, in addition to hand actions, influenced the control of mouth grasp and vocalization. Gestures and words are also related to each other. It was found that when producing communicative gestures (emblems the intention to interact directly with a conspecific was transferred from gestures to words, inducing modification in voice parameters. Transfer effects of the meaning of representational gestures were found on both vocalizations and meaningful words. It has been concluded that the results of our studies suggest the existence of a system relating gesture to vocalization which was precursor of a more general system reciprocally relating gesture to word.

EPA supports local, state and tribal efforts to maintain water quality. A key element of its efforts is to reduce excess nutrient pollution and the resulting adverse impacts, including harmful algal blooms.

... Issues Subscribe September 2017 Print this issue Hurtful Emotions Understanding Self-Harm En español Send us your ... help you learn new ways to cope with emotion. See the Wise Choices box for tips on ...

Risk assessments are the intellectual products of dedicated public health and environmental professionals. Like many other products, risk assessments carry with them the potential for both good and harm. This paper briefly examines some of the harms to which risk assessments have contributed, and then suggests that the legal 'duty to warn' doctrine offers a logical and practical way to reduce some of these harms. The paper suggests concepts that could be incorporated into warnings accompanying every formal risk assessment as routine 'boiler plate' addenda, just as other potentially harmful products, such as lawn mowers and cook stoves, are accompanied by warnings. Finally, the paper briefly examines the 'Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice for Environmental Professionals' (promulgated by the National Association of Environmental Professionals) and shows that the suggested warnings are consistent with recommended practices for environmental professionals

IAEA is stepping up efforts to help countries understand the phenomenon and use more reliable methods for early detection and monitoring so as to limit harmful algal blooms (HABs) adverse effects on coastal communities everywhere.

Full Text Available Abstract This article examines harm reduction from a novel perspective. Its central thesis is that harm reduction is not only a social concept, but also a biological one. More specifically, evolution does not make moral distinctions in the selection process, but utilizes a cannabis-based approach to harm reduction in order to promote survival of the fittest. Evidence will be provided from peer-reviewed scientific literature that supports the hypothesis that humans, and all animals, make and use internally produced cannabis-like products (endocannabinoids as part of the evolutionary harm reduction program. More specifically, endocannabinoids homeostatically regulate all body systems (cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, excretory, immune, nervous, musculo-skeletal, reproductive. Therefore, the health of each individual is dependant on this system working appropriately.

This paper analyses Rawls's celebrated difference principle, and its lexicographic extension, in societies with a finite and an infinite number of agents. A unified framework of analysis is set up, which allows one to characterise Rawlsian egalitarian principles by means of a weaker version of a new axiom - the Harm Principle - recently proposed by marven09. This is quite surprising, because the Harm principle is meant to capture a liberal requirement of noninterference and it incorporates no...

Many acts are disgusting, but only some of these acts are immoral. Dyadic morality predicts that disgusting acts should be judged as immoral to the extent that they seem harmful. Consistent with this prediction, 3 studies reveal that perceived harm mediates the link between feelings of disgust and moral condemnation-even for ostensibly harmless "purity" violations. In many cases, accounting for perceived harm completely eliminates the link between disgust and moral condemnation. Analyses also reveal the predictive power of anger and typicality/weirdness in moral judgments of disgusting acts. The mediation of disgust by harm holds across diverse acts including gay marriage, sex acts, and religious blasphemy. Revealing the endogenous presence and moral relevance of harm within disgusting-but-ostensibly harmless acts argues against modular accounts of moral cognition such as moral foundations theory. Instead, these data support pluralistic conceptions of harm and constructionist accounts of morality and emotion. Implications for moral cognition and the concept of "purity" are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

We examine the idea that aid and FDI are complementary sources of foreign capital. We argue that the relationship between aid and FDI is theoretically ambiguous: aid raises the marginal productivity of capital when used to finance complementary inputs (like public infrastructure and human capital...... investments), but aid may crowd out private investments when it comes in the shape of pure physical capital transfers. Empirically, we find that aid invested in complementary inputs draws in FDI, while aid invested in physical capital crowds it out. The paper shows that the composition of aid matters for its...

Full Text Available An ethical foreign policy can have no objectives other than those that are of service to its own people. An unethical foreign policy, however, may pursue objectives that enhance the nation as a power, seeking dominance for its own sake, for the honor, glory and wealth of the state or a minority within the state, or spreading its ideology out of missionary fervor. The mainstream wisdom in the United States is that the US foreign policy agendas are virtuous and ethical, since they are oriented mainly towards the protection and enhancement of the American ‘National Interest’. Nevertheless, the orthodox perception among many foreign observers is that the American foreign policy is by no means ethical, since it is oriented exclusively towards the promotion of the Americans’ interests at the expense of the rest of the world. My thesis is that the US foreign policy is unethical and anti-democratic mainly because it is causing a lot of harm to the American taxpayers’ interests. I esteem that the American people are the real permanent victims of their country’s globalist stance. This article is based on an argumentative criticism of the mainstream American perception of U.S. foreign policy as well as a criticism of the foreign observers’ perception of American foreign policy. In a nutshell, this article tries to highlight the unethical nature of the American foreign policy with a focus on the complex justifications for such an undemocratic globalist agenda.

Voluntary stuttering techniques involve persons who stutter purposefully interjecting disfluencies into their speech. Little research has been conducted on the impact of these techniques on the speech pattern of persons who stutter. The present study examined whether changes in the frequency of voluntary stuttering accompanied changes in stuttering frequency, articulation rate, speech naturalness, and speech effort. In total, 12 persons who stutter aged 16-34 years participated. Participants read four 300-syllable passages during a control condition, and three voluntary stuttering conditions that involved attempting to produce purposeful, tension-free repetitions of initial sounds or syllables of a word for two or more repetitions (i.e., bouncing). The three voluntary stuttering conditions included bouncing on 5%, 10%, and 15% of syllables read. Friedman tests and follow-up Wilcoxon signed ranks tests were conducted for the statistical analyses. Stuttering frequency, articulation rate, and speech naturalness were significantly different between the voluntary stuttering conditions. Speech effort did not differ between the voluntary stuttering conditions. Stuttering frequency was significantly lower during the three voluntary stuttering conditions compared to the control condition, and speech effort was significantly lower during two of the three voluntary stuttering conditions compared to the control condition. Due to changes in articulation rate across the voluntary stuttering conditions, it is difficult to conclude, as has been suggested previously, that voluntary stuttering is the reason for stuttering reductions found when using voluntary stuttering techniques. Additionally, future investigations should examine different types of voluntary stuttering over an extended period of time to determine their impact on stuttering frequency, speech rate, speech naturalness, and speech effort.

Full Text Available The aim of improving the international competitiveness of the higher education Russian system at the global level by increasing the number of foreign students leads to the fact, that pre-university training is becoming essential for next years at higher educational programmes.Pre-university mathematical training of international students contributes to the scientific style formation of speech skills, which is so useful in higher educational institute. This article highlights some of the features of foreign students pre-university mathematical training.Design of “Mathematics” course methodical ware for preparatory departments of higher educational institutions is an important element of the educational process. Features of mathematics teaching are shown by the example of such important for foreign students pre-university mathematical training branch of mathematics like the set theory.The article also gives consideration to such aspects of mathematics teaching for foreign students as the inclusion of text mathematical problems in the “Mathematics” course programme for helping to achieve lexical skills and abilities, as well as the organization of individual work of the students with the use of information and communication technologies.The paper refers to the collection of exercises and tasks for the “Mathematics” course for foreign citizens studying at the preparatory departments of higher educational institutions, it additionally gives the themes of the course.

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.g. baez) coupled to non-intact (excised onsets) auditory speech (signified…

Several speech enhancement approaches utilize trained models of clean speech data, such as codebooks, Gaussian mixtures, and hidden Markov models. These models are typically trained on neutral clean speech data, without any emotion. However, in practical scenarios, emotional speech is a common

Purpose: In this study, a new algorithm for automated determination of speech rate (SR) in dysarthric speech is evaluated. We investigated how reliably the algorithm calculates the SR of dysarthric speech samples when compared with calculation performed by speech-language pathologists. Method: The new algorithm was trained and tested using Dutch…

The Freedom of Speech Newsletter is the communication medium for the Freedom of Speech Interest Group of the Western Speech Communication Association. The newsletter contains such features as a statement of concern by the National Ad Hoc Committee Against Censorship; Reticence and Free Speech, an article by James F. Vickrey discussing the subtle…

Full Text Available This paper presents the traditional types of exchange rate risk faced by firms and some of principal methods of exchange risk management that a company which make foreign currency operations can use. Foreign currency risk management involves both assessing the risk faced by the companies and adopting measures for the risk hedging or reduce the damage it may cause. The damages result from the company’s unfavorable difference between the exchange rates of the currencies in which the transactions are made.

There is provided an apparatus and method for assisting speech recovery in people with inability to speak due to aphasia, apraxia or another condition with similar effect. A hollow, rigid, thin-walled tube with semi-circular or semi-elliptical cut out shapes at each open end is positioned such that one end mates with the throat/voice box area of the neck of the assistor and the other end mates with the throat/voice box area of the assisted. The speaking person (assistor) makes sounds that produce standing wave vibrations at the same frequency in the vocal cords of the assisted person. Driving the assisted person's vocal cords with the assisted person being able to hear the correct tone enables the assisted person to speak by simply amplifying the vibration of membranes in their throat.

There is provided an apparatus and method for assisting speech recovery in people with inability to speak due to aphasia, apraxia or another condition with similar effect. A hollow, rigid, thin-walled tube with semi-circular or semi-elliptical cut out shapes at each open end is positioned such that one end mates with the throat/voice box area of the neck of the assistor and the other end mates with the throat/voice box area of the assisted. The speaking person (assistor) makes sounds that produce standing wave vibrations at the same frequency in the vocal cords of the assisted person. Driving the assisted person's vocal cords with the assisted person being able to hear the correct tone enables the assisted person to speak by simply amplifying the vibration of membranes in their throat.

Digital audio provides a suitable cover for high-throughput steganography. At 16 bits per sample and sampled at a rate of 44,100 Hz, digital audio has the bit-rate to support large messages. In addition, audio is often transient and unpredictable, facilitating the hiding of messages. Using an approach similar to our universal image steganalysis, we show that hidden messages alter the underlying statistics of audio signals. Our statistical model begins by building a linear basis that captures certain statistical properties of audio signals. A low-dimensional statistical feature vector is extracted from this basis representation and used by a non-linear support vector machine for classification. We show the efficacy of this approach on LSB embedding and Hide4PGP. While no explicit assumptions about the content of the audio are made, our technique has been developed and tested on high-quality recorded speech.

Complete text of publication follows. Objective: Drinking water, water used in food production and for irrigation, water for fish farming, waste water, surface water, and recreational water have been recently recognized as a vector for the transmission of harmful micro-organisms. The human and animal harmful algae is a waterborne risk to public health and economy because the algae are ubiquitous and persistent in water and wastewater, not completely removed by physical-chemical treatment processes, and relatively resistant to chemical disinfection. Gamma and electron beam radiation technology is of growing in the water industry since it was demonstrated that gamma and electron beam radiation is very effective against harmful algae. Materials and Methods: Harmful algae (Scenedesmus quadricauda(Turpin) Brebisson 1835 (AG10003), Chlorella vulgaris Beijerinck 1896 (AG30007) and Chlamydomonas sp. (AG10061)) were distributed from Korean collection for type cultures (KCTC). Strains were cultured aerobically in Allen's medium at 25□ and 300 umol/m2s for 1 week using bioreactor. We investigated the disinfection efficiency of harmful algae irradiated with gamma (0.05 to 10 kGy for 30 min) and electron beam (1 to 19 kGy for 5 sec) rays. Results and Conclusion: We investigated the disinfection efficiency of harmful algae irradiated with gamma and electron beam rays of 50 to 19000 Gy. We established the optimum sterilization condition which use the gamma and electron beam radiation. Gamma ray disinfected harmful algae at 400 Gy for 30 min. Also, electron beam disinfected at 1000 Gy for 5 sec. This alternative disinfection practice had powerful disinfection efficiency. Hence, the multi-barrier approach for drinking water treatment in which a combination of various disinfectants and filtration technologies are applied for removal and inactivation of different microbial pathogens will guarantee a lower risk of microbial contamination.

Full Text Available Abstract Background Balanced decisions about health care interventions require reliable evidence on harms as well as benefits. Most systematic reviews focus on efficacy and randomised trials, for which the methodology is well established. Methods to systematically review harmful effects are less well developed and there are few sources of guidance for researchers. We present our own recent experience of conducting systematic reviews of harmful effects and make suggestions for future practice and further research. Methods We described and compared the methods used in three systematic reviews. Our evaluation focused on the review question, study designs and quality assessment. Results One review question focused on providing information on specific harmful effects to furnish an economic model, the other two addressed much broader questions. All three reviews included randomised and observational data, although each defined the inclusion criteria differently. Standard methods were used to assess study quality. Various practical problems were encountered in applying the study design inclusion criteria and assessing quality, mainly because of poor study design, inadequate reporting and the limitations of existing tools. All three reviews generated a large volume of work that did not yield much useful information for health care decision makers. The key areas for improvement we identified were focusing the review question and developing methods for quality assessment of studies of harmful effects. Conclusions Systematic reviews of harmful effects are more likely to yield information pertinent to clinical decision-making if they address a focused question. This will enable clear decisions to be made about the type of research to include in the review. The methodology for assessing the quality of harmful effects data in systematic reviews requires further development.

With the proliferation of mobile devices and hearing devices, including hearing aids and cochlear implants, there is a growing and pressing need to design algorithms that can improve speech intelligibility without sacrificing quality. Responding to this need, Speech Enhancement: Theory and Practice, Second Edition introduces readers to the basic problems of speech enhancement and the various algorithms proposed to solve these problems. Updated and expanded, this second edition of the bestselling textbook broadens its scope to include evaluation measures and enhancement algorithms aimed at impr

Full Text Available This paper provides an interface between the machine translation and speech synthesis system for converting English speech to Tamil text in English to Tamil speech to speech translation system. The speech translation system consists of three modules: automatic speech recognition, machine translation and text to speech synthesis. Many procedures for incorporation of speech recognition and machine translation have been projected. Still speech synthesis system has not yet been measured. In this paper, we focus on integration of machine translation and speech synthesis, and report a subjective evaluation to investigate the impact of speech synthesis, machine translation and the integration of machine translation and speech synthesis components. Here we implement a hybrid machine translation (combination of rule based and statistical machine translation and concatenative syllable based speech synthesis technique. In order to retain the naturalness and intelligibility of synthesized speech Auto Associative Neural Network (AANN prosody prediction is used in this work. The results of this system investigation demonstrate that the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthesized speech are strongly influenced by the fluency and correctness of the translated text.

Speech of people with autism is recognised as one of the basic diagnostic, therapeutic and theoretical problems. One of the most common symptoms of autism in children is echolalia, described here as being of different types and severity. This paper presents the results of studies into different levels of echolalia, both in normally developing children and in children diagnosed with autism, discusses the differences between simple echolalia and echolalic speech - which can be considered to b...

tecture, are either wrapped natural-language processing ( NLP ) components or objects developed from scratch using the architecture’s API. GATE is...framework, we put together a demonstration Arabic -to- English speech translation system using both internally developed ( Arabic speech recognition and MT...conditions of our Arabic S2S demonstration system described earlier. Once again, the data size was varied and eighty identical requests were

The relation of personality to disability in old age is not well understood. The authors examined the relation of harm avoidance, a trait indicating a tendency to worry, fear uncertainty, be shy, and tire easily, to disability in a group of 474 older persons without dementia. Participants completed the 35-item Harm Avoidance scale. Disability was assessed with the Rosow-Breslau scale, a self-report measure of physical mobility. Performance-based tests of lower limb functions were also administered from which composite measures of gait, balance, and strength were derived. In a logistic regression model controlled for age, sex, education, and lower limb function, persons with high levels of harm avoidance were nearly three times as likely to report mobility limitations as persons with low levels, and these effects largely reflected fatigability and fear of uncertainty. The association of harm avoidance with disability was not explained or modified by frailty, physical activity, depressive symptoms, neuroticism, extraversion, or cognition. The results suggest that harm avoidance is associated with disability in old age.

Full Text Available This article deals with the advantages of case-study and its potential in forming the motivation for studying the English language for students of non-linguistic specialities, psychology students in particular. Training future psychologists foreign language communication should involve cases, published in foreign periodicals, and numerous exercises and communicative tasks according to the requirements of the case-technology which is used during their learning process. The studies enable to single out the main criteria of cases selection for the successful formation of foreignspeech with the students of psychological faculty.

Full Text Available ... to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your physician also may locate soft-tissue objects by probing the wound. Additional tests ... prevent a potentially deadly infection of the nervous system. In some ... Ultrasound provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding ...

Three types of theories have been used to explain the wage premium in foreign firms: the theories of heterogeneous workers, heterogeneous learning, and heterogeneous firms. We set up a model that explicitly encompasses two of these theories, and that can illustrate the third. This unifying...

Full Text Available ... levels of sedative and anesthetic. Ultrasound may be used to guide the foreign body removal procedure. After you are positioned on the examination table, the radiologist or sonographer will apply some warm water-based gel on your skin and then place ...

The aim of this contribution is, through a comparative historical perspective, to analyse the particular phenomenon of foreign fighters, which in recent years, as a consequence of the proliferation of conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, have emerged in Danish society as a major security concern...

Full Text Available ... endoscopic or surgical intervention is required only 10 to 20 percent of the time. Evaluation and treatment will depend on the type ... to view the surgical instrument as it advances to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your physician also may locate soft-tissue objects ...

Full Text Available ... and push the object farther down. In some cases, prompt removal of the foreign body is necessary. Common procedures include: Flexible esophagoscopy Flexible esophagoscopy is a common diagnostic examination that enables a safe and detailed visual study of the esophagus while the patient is under ...

Full Text Available Foreign Language Interactive Didactics is intended for foreign language teachers and would-be teachers since it is an interpretation of the foreign language teaching-learning process is conceived from a reflexive social interaction. This interpretation declares learning based on interactive tasks that provide learners with opportunities to interact meaningfully among them, as a way to develop interactional competence as objective in itself and as a means to obtain communicative competence. Foreign language interactive didactics claims for the unity of reflection and action while learning the language system and using it to communicate, by means of solving problems presented in interactive tasks. It proposes a kind of teaching that is interactive, developmental, collaborative, holist, cognitive, problematizing, reflexive, student centered, humanist, and with a strong affective component that empower the influencing psychological factors in learning. This conception appears in the book: DIDÁCTICA INTERACTIVA DE LENGUAS (2007 y 2010. The book is used as a textbook for the subject of Didactics that is part of the curriculum in language teachers’ formation of all the pedagogical sciences universities, in Spanish teachers’ formation who are not Spanish speaking people at Havana University, and also as a reference book for postgraduate courses, master’s and doctorate’ s degrees.

Full Text Available ... sound waves), as well as the type of body structure and composition of body tissue through which the sound travels. A small ... complications. There is always a slight chance of cancer from excessive exposure ... limitations of foreign body detection and removal? The primary limitation of an ...

Full Text Available ... so as not to expose the fetus to radiation. If an x-ray is necessary, precautions will be taken to minimize ... Safety page for more information about pregnancy and x-rays. If the foreign body is lodged in a ...

Parliaments differ enormously in their foreign policy competences. This is best documented in the area of “war powers,” understood as decision-making on the use of force. In other issue areas, such as treaty-making, defense budgets, sanctions, or arms exports, differences across countries are far

Full Text Available ... on the type of foreign body and how it was introduced. If it was swallowed, you may undergo a direct examination ... and esophagus or an x-ray examination. If it is lodged in a soft tissue, such as ...

Full Text Available ... of it. Esophageal bougienage For this procedure, you will sit upright while the physician passes a device from the mouth to the stomach that helps dilate, or widen, the esophagus. This helps advance the foreign body into the stomach, from where ...

Full Text Available ... by a computer, which in turn creates a real-time picture on the monitor. One or more frames ... to the location of the foreign object in real-time. Your physician also may locate soft-tissue objects ...

This article focuses on speech mannerisms often employed by clients in a helping relationship. Eight mannerisms are presented and discussed, as well as possible interpretations. Suggestions are given to help counselors respond to them. (Author)

Carrier nature of speech; modulation spectrum; spectral dynamics ... the relationships between phonetic values of sounds and their short-term spectral envelopes .... the number of free parameters that need to be estimated from training data.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is two-folded. First, it offers a general overview of the legal repression of various categories of expressive behaviours ascribed to the notion of hate speech. Especially in Europe, such repression often passes through criminalization, long since used by law to suppress thoughts or points of view for some reason considered harmful. The social groups nowadays protected by such repressive measures, however, are different from the past: weak and/or minoritarian groups rather than strong and/or majoritarian ones. The second aim of this work is to identify the reasons for the legal repression of expressions, beliefs or doctrines certainly in many cases morally deplorable, yet protected by other high-ranking legal reasons: the principles of freedom of thought and speech. It will be noted that especially for untargeted hate speech not connected to a clear and present danger of unlawful actions, there is no general agreement about those reasons. Furthermore, they tend to be structured in justifications showing some typical flaws of, respectively, deontological and teleological reasoning: the former tend to be superficial as apodictic, generic and vacuous; the latter tend to evade the argumentative burdens of factual order from which their validity depends.

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of self-harm and harm to others from the perspective of two adult offspring and a father, the latter of whom was prone to alcohol abuse and domestic violence and had attempted suicide. Written informed consents were obtained from the subjects after a detailed explanation of the research aims and procedures. A qualitative, phenomenological method was applied for the study. Three subjects were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide designed by the researchers and based on the aims of the study over a six-month period of home care. A qualitative content analysis based on a phenomenological method was used to identify themes in the data. Two main categories emerged: (1) the mutual harm to the couple subsystem, (2) the misplaced parental-child subsystem. Subsequently, two to four themes were identified from each category. These results provide a better analysis and understanding of the perceived experiences of the harm to the spouse, parental, and sibling subsystems. They should also help health professionals to improve awareness of the lived experiences associated with the issues of self-harm and threats of harm to others. This study could serve as a valuable reference in promoting possible prevention strategies aiming at the reduction of self-harm and harm to others in dysfunctional families within the community.

The objective of this study was to describe deliberate self-harming (DSH) characteristics in a child-welfare population identified as having threatened or completed self-harm. Secondary data from 621 serious occurrence reports (SOR) that documented 2004-2007 DSH incidents and DSH threats with 252 Canadian youth in care (Y-INC) of the Children's…

The article shows the differences between the speech etiquette of different peoples. The most important thing is to find a common language with this or that interlocutor. Knowledge of national etiquette, national character helps to learn the principles of speech of another nation. The article indicates in which cases certain forms of etiquette considered acceptable. At the same time, the rules of etiquette emphasized in the conduct of a dialogue in official meetings and for example, in the ex...

What happens to a person who speaks out about corruption in their organization, and finds themselves excluded from their profession? In this article, I argue that whistleblowers experience exclusions because they have engaged in ‘impossible speech’, that is, a speech act considered to be unacceptable or illegitimate. Drawing on Butler’s theories of recognition and censorship, I show how norms of acceptable speech working through recruitment practices, alongside the actions of colleagues, can ...

The article deals with the question whether the exclusion of foreigners from participation in a licensing procedure pursuant to Atomic Energy Law (Administrative Court Oldenburg, February 6, 1985) may be transferred to the licensing procedure pursuant to the Federal Art on Protection Against Harmful Effects on the Environment. A further problem concerns the consideration of foreign neighbours' interests by the licensing authority. While the authors accept the latter, they refuse the right of action of foreigners. (CW) [de

Full Text Available Textbooks play an important role in English Language Teaching (ELT, particularly in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL context where it provides the primary linguistic input. The present research was an attempt to comparatively evaluate the Touchstone series in terms of compliment and complaint speech acts. Four Touchstone textbooks (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and Book 4 were selected and content analysis was done using Olshtain and Weinbach’s (1993 complaint strategies and Wolfson and Manes’ (1980 classification of compliment. The frequencies and percentages of compliments and complaint speech acts were obtained. Data analysis showed that, first, the total frequency of the complaint speech act was higher in Touchstone, Book 4 than the other three textbooks; second, the frequency of complaint and compliment speech acts in the Writing section was quite low, but the Conversation section had a high frequency of compliment speech act in the Touchstone series; third, the expression of annoyance or disapproval complaint strategy was frequently used in the Touchstone series; fourth, the compliment strategy of ‘noun phrase + looks/is (intensifier adjective’ was very frequent in the Touchstone series; finally, there was a significant difference between the frequencies of the two speech acts, in general, in the four Touchstone textbooks. Considering the weaknesses and strengthens of Touchstone series, implications for teachers, material developers, and textbook writers are provided.

One aim of this article is to show through a concrete example how speech function and speech role used in movie. The illustrative example is taken from the dialogue of Up movie. Central to the analysis proper form of dialogue on Up movie that contain of speech function and speech role; i.e. statement, offer, question, command, giving, and demanding. 269 dialogue were interpreted by actor, and it was found that the use of speech function and speech role.

Through 1987, 10 percent of foreign investment was in nonmetro counties; 44 percent of this was in the South; and 38 percent of nonmetro foreign investment created new jobs (versus 17 percent in metro areas). Foreign investors chose nonmetro areas with low wages, lack of unionization history, good transportation access, and government incentives.…

To explore Australian speech-language pathologists' use of non-speech oral motor exercises, and rationales for using/not using non-speech oral motor exercises in clinical practice. A total of 124 speech-language pathologists practising in Australia, working with paediatric and/or adult clients with speech sound difficulties, completed an online survey. The majority of speech-language pathologists reported that they did not use non-speech oral motor exercises when working with paediatric or adult clients with speech sound difficulties. However, more than half of the speech-language pathologists working with adult clients who have dysarthria reported using non-speech oral motor exercises with this population. The most frequently reported rationale for using non-speech oral motor exercises in speech sound difficulty management was to improve awareness/placement of articulators. The majority of speech-language pathologists agreed there is no clear clinical or research evidence base to support non-speech oral motor exercise use with clients who have speech sound difficulties. This study provides an overview of Australian speech-language pathologists' reported use and perceptions of non-speech oral motor exercises' applicability and efficacy in treating paediatric and adult clients who have speech sound difficulties. The research findings provide speech-language pathologists with insight into how and why non-speech oral motor exercises are currently used, and adds to the knowledge base regarding Australian speech-language pathology practice of non-speech oral motor exercises in the treatment of speech sound difficulties. Implications for Rehabilitation Non-speech oral motor exercises refer to oral motor activities which do not involve speech, but involve the manipulation or stimulation of oral structures including the lips, tongue, jaw, and soft palate. Non-speech oral motor exercises are intended to improve the function (e.g., movement, strength) of oral structures. The

Full Text Available This empirical research paper focuses on establishing a relationship between external determinants and economic growth of Pakistan economy. Empirical analyses are carried out with time series econometric techniques using data over the period of 1977-2013. The main finding is that external determinants such as foreign remittances, foreign direct investment, and foreign imports matter from a growth perspective. Foreign remittances and foreign direct investment have a significant positive role in the growth process of Pakistan economy. Furthermore, it is found that foreign imports have adversely influenced the economic growth of Pakistan. The study recommends that policy makers shall take appropriate steps to increase the inflow of both foreign remittances and foreign direct investment in order to achieve the long run economic growth.

Novel Techniques for Dialectal Arabic Speech describes approaches to improve automatic speech recognition for dialectal Arabic. Since speech resources for dialectal Arabic speech recognition are very sparse, the authors describe how existing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) speech data can be applied to dialectal Arabic speech recognition, while assuming that MSA is always a second language for all Arabic speakers. In this book, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) has been chosen as a typical Arabic dialect. ECA is the first ranked Arabic dialect in terms of number of speakers, and a high quality ECA speech corpus with accurate phonetic transcription has been collected. MSA acoustic models were trained using news broadcast speech. In order to cross-lingually use MSA in dialectal Arabic speech recognition, the authors have normalized the phoneme sets for MSA and ECA. After this normalization, they have applied state-of-the-art acoustic model adaptation techniques like Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) and M...

Informed by the principles of communicative foreign language teaching, this study focuses on the interaction level of speaking activities in the coursebook series of ‘İstanbul- Yabancılar İçin Türkçe Ders Kitabı’. To this end, the study analyzed firstly the rate of two-way speech to one-way speech among speaking activities and then the characteristics of two-way activities were explored with a focus on their compatibility with the nature of real interaction as described in the relevant litera...

During the acoustical design of, e.g., auditoria or open-plan offices, it is important to know how speech can be perceived in various parts of the room. Different objective methods have been developed to measure and predict speech intelligibility, and these have been extensively used in various spaces. In this study, two such methods were compared, the speech transmission index (STI) and the speech intelligibility index (SII). Also the simplification of the STI, the room acoustics speech transmission index (RASTI), was considered. These quantities are all based on determining an apparent speech-to-noise ratio on selected frequency bands and summing them using a specific weighting. For comparison, some data were needed on the possible differences of these methods resulting from the calculation scheme and also measuring equipment. Their prediction accuracy was also of interest. Measurements were made in a laboratory having adjustable noise level and absorption, and in a real auditorium. It was found that the measurement equipment, especially the selection of the loudspeaker, can greatly affect the accuracy of the results. The prediction accuracy of the RASTI was found acceptable, if the input values for the prediction are accurately known, even though the studied space was not ideally diffuse.

Full Text Available This paper examines the questions, what levels of speech can be perceived visually, and how is visual speech represented by the brain? Review of the literature leads to the conclusions that every level of psycholinguistic speech structure (i.e., phonetic features, phonemes, syllables, words, and prosody can be perceived visually, although individuals differ in their abilities to do so; and that there are visual modality-specific representations of speech qua speech in higher-level vision brain areas. That is, the visual system represents the modal patterns of visual speech. The suggestion that the auditory speech pathway receives and represents visual speech is examined in light of neuroimaging evidence on the auditory speech pathways. We outline the generally agreed-upon organization of the visual ventral and dorsal pathways and examine several types of visual processing that might be related to speech through those pathways, specifically, face and body, orthography, and sign language processing. In this context, we examine the visual speech processing literature, which reveals widespread diverse patterns activity in posterior temporal cortices in response to visual speech stimuli. We outline a model of the visual and auditory speech pathways and make several suggestions: (1 The visual perception of speech relies on visual pathway representations of speech qua speech. (2 A proposed site of these representations, the temporal visual speech area (TVSA has been demonstrated in posterior temporal cortex, ventral and posterior to multisensory posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS. (3 Given that visual speech has dynamic and configural features, its representations in feedforward visual pathways are expected to integrate these features, possibly in TVSA.

htmlabstractDense surface blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in eutrophic lakes may lead to mass mortalities of fish and birds, and provide a serious health threat for cattle, pets, and humans. It has been argued that global warming may increase the incidence of harmful algal blooms. Here, we report on a

Dense surface blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in eutrophic lakes may lead to mass mortalities of fish and birds, and provide a serious health threat for cattle, pets, and humans. It has been argued that global warming may increase the incidence of harmful algal blooms. Here, we report on a lake

Nov 17, 2014 ... impact of harmful traditional home care practices on ... She was initially on breast milk and water until the tenth day of life ... and zygomatic bone as well as loss of subcutaneous fat. (fig 1). .... ity and protection during the neo-.

In an effort to minimize the harmful effects of violent TV, a yearlong intervention was undertaken with children in Grades 1 through 3 (N = 177). The classroom-based intervention consisted of 31 brief lessons that emphasized the many ways in which television distorts violence. As hypothesized, the intervention resulted in a reduction in children's…

Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, though recent studies suggest this may not be the case. Using a unique identification strategy that employs school-by-grade level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 850,000 New York…

Foreign accent syndrome is a rare motor speech disorder that causes patients to speak their language with a non-native accent. In the neurogenic condition, the disorder develops after lesions in the language dominant hemisphere, often affecting Broca's area, the insula, the supplementary motor area

The purpose of this study is to clarify Japanese attitudes towards foreign languages based on the kinds and changes of TV and radio programs that aired on the Japanese national broadcasting station (NHK) between 1955 and 2000. Foreign language programs are classified into three groups according to their content: 1) cultivation, 2) education, or 3) communication. For Japanese people, foreign languages are the measures of intelligence and intellect. Studying a foreign language is considered a sign of intelligence whether or not it is used for actual communication. The number of foreign language programs has increased tremendously since 1965 in part because the global economy has brought many countries in such close contact. Since 1990, programs for the purpose of communication have increased because of the necessity to communicate with foreign people. Japanese attitudes towards studying foreign languages have been changing gradually from an intellectual purpose to a communication purpose.

Full Text Available This paper tries to analyze the importance and the relationship between communication and pragmatic skills in foreign language classes. Philosophers and linguists have dealt with language, analyzing it from the psychological viewpoint. Communication in L1 or L2 is related and it depends on the science of pragmatics. While communicating, interlocutors interact impacted by the context, the situation, the receiver, the sender, by using the formal or the informal language according to the circumstances. For this reason, we try, in this paper, to make a thorough description of the relationship between communication and pragmatics. Students need to master pragmatic skills in order to communicate. If Italian students or foreign language students have developed pragmatic skills in the native language, this will help them learning a foreign language. The goal of the foreign language teacher is to help students achieve communication skills. The pragmatic and communication skills can be practiced through communication activities like in L1 for speech acts are practiced in communication.

Although spontaneous speech occurs more frequently in most listeners' experience than read speech, laboratory studies of human speech recognition typically use carefully controlled materials read from a script. The phonological and prosodic characteristics of spontaneous and read speech differ

Full Text Available Learning a foreign language requires students to acquire both grammatical knowledge and socio-pragmatic rules of a language. Pragmatic competence as one of the most difficult aspects of language provides several challenges to L2 learners in the process of learning a foreign language. To overcome this problem, EFL teachers should find the most effective way of teaching pragmatic knowledge to their students. Accordingly, the present study investigated the effect of explicit teaching of apology speech act, as an aspect of pragmatic competence, on the Iranian EFL learners’ appropriate use of the mentioned speech act. In so doing, a total of 73 EFL students at intermediate and advanced levels participated in a pre-posttest design research with experimental and control group. Data were collected using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT. The selection of apologetic situations in DCT was based on two variables of social status and social distance. The results revealed that explicit instruction was a facilitative tool that helped students use the proper apology strategies in different situations. Moreover, it was found that L2 proficiency had a significant influence on overall appropriateness of speech act production. Keywords: Explicit instruction; Apology speech act; Pragmatic competence; Iranian EFL learners

Full Text Available This paper focuses on the rhetoric of USA and Russian political leaders during the Ukraine crisis by analyzing changes appearing in their speeches during the different stages of the crisis. The goal of the analysis is to investigate the speeches delivered by political leaders of the United States and Russia, being important actors in the Ukraine crisis, by identifying both countries’ attitudes to one another, further intentions regarding the management of the crisis and changes of topics in each stage. The speeches of the following most influential politicians in foreign policy formation in the USA and Russia are analyzed: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden, President Vladimir Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev. The speeches were collected from the official websites of U.S. and Russian government institutions. The analysis revealed that from the beginning of the crisis the main tool in the Ukraine crisis was rhetoric. Western parties began to take real actions only later: sanctions on Russia were imposed, international organizations started to play more active role, ceasefire agreements were signed. In terms of communications strategies used by both countries, the USA rhetoric and its communication strategy as well as Russian leaders were using a combination of proactive and reactive strategies.

A method is presented in which conventional speech algorithms are applied, with no modifications, to improve their performance in extremely noisy environments. It has been demonstrated that, for eigen-channel algorithms, pre-training multiple speaker identification (SID) models at a lattice of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) levels and then performing SID using the appropriate SNR dependent model was successful in mitigating noise at all SNR levels. In those tests, it was found that SID performance was optimized when the SNR of the testing and training data were close or identical. In this current effort multiple i-vector algorithms were used, greatly improving both processing throughput and equal error rate classification accuracy. Using identical approaches in the same noisy environment, performance of SID, language identification, gender identification, and diarization were significantly improved. A critical factor in this improvement is speech activity detection (SAD) that performs reliably in extremely noisy environments, where the speech itself is barely audible. To optimize SAD operation at all SNR levels, two algorithms were employed. The first maximized detection probability at low levels (-10 dB ≤ SNR < +10 dB) using just the voiced speech envelope, and the second exploited features extracted from the original speech to improve overall accuracy at higher quality levels (SNR ≥ +10 dB).

This chapter has shown an overview of the main challenges in robust speech detection and a review of the state of the art and applications. VADs are frequently used in a number of applications including speech coding, speech enhancement and speech recognition. A precise VAD extracts a set of discriminative speech features from the noisy speech and formulates the decision in terms of well defined rule. The chapter has summarized three robust VAD methods that yield high speech/non-speech discri...

The rationale for breast cancer screening with mammography is deceptively simple: catch it early and reduce mortality from the disease and the need for mastectomies. But breast cancer is a complex problem, and complex problems rarely have simple solutions. Breast screening brings forward the time of diagnosis only slightly compared to the lifetime of a tumour, and screen-detected tumours have a size where metastases are possible. A key question is if screening can prevent metastases, and if the screen-detected tumours are small enough to allow breast conserving surgery rather than mastectomy. A mortality reduction can never justify a medical intervention in its own right, but must be weighed against the harms. Overdiagnosis is the most important harm of breast screening, but has gained wider recognition only in recent years. Screening leads to the detection and treatment of breast cancers that would otherwise never have been detected because they grow very slowly or not at all and would not have been detected in the woman's lifetime in the absence of screening. Screening therefore turns women into cancer patients unnecessarily, with life-long physical and psychological harms. The debate about the justification of breast screening is therefore not a simple question of whether screening reduces breast cancer mortality. This dissertation quantifies the primary benefits and harms of screening mammography. Denmark has an unscreened "control group" because only two geographical regions offered screening over a long time-period, which is unique in an international context. This was used to study breast cancer mortality, overdiagnosis, and the use of mastectomies. Also, a systematic review of overdiagnosis in five other countries allowed us to show that about half of the screen-detected breast cancers are overdiagnosed. An effect on breast cancer mortality is doubtful in today's setting, and overdiagnosis causes an increase in the use of mastectomies. These findings are

Purpose: The current research sought to determine (a) if speech inconsistency is a core feature of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) or if it is driven by comorbid language impairment that affects a large subset of children with CAS and (b) if speech inconsistency is a sensitive and specific diagnostic marker that can differentiate between CAS and…

In this work, we consider enhancement of multichannel speech recordings. Linear filtering and subspace approaches have been considered previously for solving the problem. The current linear filtering methods, although many variants exist, have limited control of noise reduction and speech...

Represented speech refers to speech where we reference somebody. Represented speech is an important phenomenon in everyday conversation, health care communication, and qualitative research. This case will draw first from a case study on physicians’ workplace learning and second from a case study...... on nurses’ apprenticeship learning. The aim of the case is to guide the qualitative researcher to use own and others’ voices in the interview and to be sensitive to represented speech in everyday conversation. Moreover, reported speech matters to health professionals who aim to represent the voice...... of their patients. Qualitative researchers and students might learn to encourage interviewees to elaborate different voices or perspectives. Qualitative researchers working with natural speech might pay attention to how people talk and use represented speech. Finally, represented speech might be relevant...

Full Text Available Stuttered speech is a dysfluency rich speech, more prevalent in males than females. It has been associated with insufficient air pressure or poor articulation, even though the root causes are more complex. The primary features include prolonged speech and repetitive speech, while some of its secondary features include, anxiety, fear, and shame. This study used LPC analysis and synthesis algorithms to reconstruct the stuttered speech. The results were evaluated using cepstral distance, Itakura-Saito distance, mean square error, and likelihood ratio. These measures implied perfect speech reconstruction quality. ASR was used for further testing, and the results showed that all the reconstructed speech samples were perfectly recognized while only three samples of the original speech were perfectly recognized.

Speech disabilities (articulation deficits) and language disorders--expressive (vocabulary) receptive (language comprehension) are not uncommon in children. An overview of these along with a global description of the impairment of communication as well as clinical characteristics of language developmental disorders are presented in this article. The diagnostic tables, which are applied in the European and Anglo-American speech areas, ICD-10 and DSM-IV, have been explained and compared. Because of their strengths and weaknesses an alternative classification of language and speech developmental disorders is proposed, which allows a differentiation between expressive and receptive language capabilities with regard to the semantic and the morphological/syntax domains. Prevalence and comorbidity rates, psychosocial influences, biological factors and the biological social interaction have been discussed. The necessity of the use of standardized examinations is emphasised. General logopaedic treatment paradigms, specific therapy concepts and an overview of prognosis have been described.

Purpose: Our purpose was to create a comprehensive review of speech impairment in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and progressive apraxia of speech in order to identify the most effective measures for diagnosis and monitoring, and to elucidate associations between speech and neuroimaging. Method: Speech and…

Purpose: This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech

Purpose: Speech acoustic characteristics of children with cerebral palsy (CP) were examined with a multiple speech subsystems approach; speech intelligibility was evaluated using a prediction model in which acoustic measures were selected to represent three speech subsystems. Method: Nine acoustic variables reflecting different subsystems, and…

Purpose: This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech comprehension have only been performed separately. Method:…

An experimental Dutch keyboard-to-speech system has been developed to explor the possibilities and limitations of Dutch speech synthesis in a communication aid for the speech impaired. The system uses diphones and a formant synthesizer chip for speech synthesis. Input to the system is in

Background: Previous studies have shown that in semi-spontaneous speech, individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia produce relatively many direct speech constructions. It has been claimed that in "healthy" communication direct speech constructions contribute to the liveliness, and indirectly to the comprehensibility, of speech.…

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is hypothesized to arise from deficits in speech motor planning and programming, but the influence of abnormal speech perception in CAS on these processes is debated. This study examined speech perception abilities among children with CAS with and without language impairment compared to those with…

The issue of whether speech is supported by the same neural substrates as non-speech vocal tract gestures has been contentious. In this fMRI study we tested whether producing non-speech vocal tract gestures in humans shares the same functional neuroanatomy as non-sense speech syllables. Production of non-speech vocal tract gestures, devoid of phonological content but similar to speech in that they had familiar acoustic and somatosensory targets, was compared to the production of speech syllables without meaning. Brain activation related to overt production was captured with BOLD fMRI using a sparse sampling design for both conditions. Speech and non-speech were compared using voxel-wise whole brain analyses, and ROI analyses focused on frontal and temporoparietal structures previously reported to support speech production. Results showed substantial activation overlap between speech and non-speech function in regions. Although non-speech gesture production showed greater extent and amplitude of activation in the regions examined, both speech and non-speech showed comparable left laterality in activation for both target perception and production. These findings posit a more general role of the previously proposed "auditory dorsal stream" in the left hemisphere--to support the production of vocal tract gestures that are not limited to speech processing.

Apraxia of Speech (AoS) is a neurogenic speech disorder. A wide variety of behavioural methods have been developed to treat AoS. Various therapy programmes use musical elements to improve speech production. A unique therapy programme combining elements of speech therapy and music therapy is called

Children with developmental speech disorders may have additional deficits in speech perception and/or short-term memory. To determine whether these are only transient developmental delays that can accompany the disorder in childhood or persist as part of the speech disorder, adults with a persistent familial speech disorder were tested on speech…

Full Text Available The purpose of this article is to acquaint the specialists, working with children having developmental disorders, with age-related norms for speech development. Many well-known linguists and psychologists studied speech ontogenesis (logogenesis. Speech is a higher mental function, which integrates many functional systems. Speech development in infants during the first months after birth is ensured by the innate hearing and emerging ability to fix the gaze on the face of an adult. Innate emotional reactions are also being developed during this period, turning into nonverbal forms of communication. At about 6 months a baby starts to pronounce some syllables; at 7–9 months – repeats various sounds combinations, pronounced by adults. At 10–11 months a baby begins to react on the words, referred to him/her. The first words usually appear at an age of 1 year; this is the start of the stage of active speech development. At this time it is acceptable, if a child confuses or rearranges sounds, distorts or misses them. By the age of 1.5 years a child begins to understand abstract explanations of adults. Significant vocabulary enlargement occurs between 2 and 3 years; grammatical structures of the language are being formed during this period (a child starts to use phrases and sentences. Preschool age (3–7 y. o. is characterized by incorrect, but steadily improving pronunciation of sounds and phonemic perception. The vocabulary increases; abstract speech and retelling are being formed. Children over 7 y. o. continue to improve grammar, writing and reading skills. The described stages may not have strict age boundaries, as soon as they are dependent not only on environment, but also on the child’s mental constitution, heredity and character.

The work is a brief description of the content of the reports delivered at the seminar entitled Protecting the Air Basin from Harmful Discharges of the Machine Building Enterprises, which took place at the All Union Exhibit of the Achievements of the National Economy of the USSR (VDNKh) in 1982. Representatives of different ministries and agencies, scientific research institutes (NII), planning and design and other specialized organizations, institutes of higher learning (vuz) and enterprises from different branches of industry took part in the work of the seminar. The seminar noted measures to eliminate deficiencies which occur in individual enterprises of the branch and measures to improve the work to improve protection of the air basin from harmful discharges of machine building enterprises.

The book deals with accidentally or purposefully induced harmful effects on plants, i.e. eukariyotes and fungi, with emphasis being placed on chemicals as the main pollutants. After discussing the quantification of damage as a prerequisite for detecting, defining, and possibly preventing, damage to plants by toxic substances in the environment, the second part of the book deals with the harmful effects that are purposefully induced, for example in agriculture or horticulture, by employment of pesticides (herbicides or fungicides). In this context, all aspects of uptake, metabolism, and detoxication are discussed, especially referring to the molecular conditions of relevance to a selective elimination of metabolic or developmental processes in the plants, which is explained by the effects of pesticides and antibiotics. Injuries caused by autogenous substances in the plants, upon exceeding a certain amount or dose are also explained, together with effects of physical factors (as e.g. ionizing radiation), or biogenic factors (as e.g. parasites). (ECB) [de

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to show boundaries between fair and harmful tax competition. The author analyses OECD’s reports and literature related to the tax competition. In the beginning, the author presents the notion of tax competition and its division into fair and unfair tax competition. Differences between tax heaven and preferential tax regime are also discussed. In the summary, the author highlights that boundaries between fair and harmful tax competition are not obvious, but there are well-known guidelines, which let distinguish above-mentioned issues. The author considers that there are real tax burden, effective exchange of tax information and transparency in the fair tax regime. The author states that taxpayer can do justified tax planning in such tax system.

Party drug use, the intermittent use of stimulants, ecstasy and so-called 'designer drugs' at dance parties or 'raves', is now part of the culture of many young Australians. This article discusses the risks associated with the use of 'party drugs' and describes an useful approach to general practitioner assessment and management of patients who may be using party drugs. Party drug use is associated with a range of harms, including risks associated with behaviour while drug affected, toxicity and overdose, mental health complications and physical morbidity. Multiple substance use, particularly combining sedatives, further amplifies risk. If GPs have some understanding of these drugs and their effects, they are well placed to provide an effective intervention in party drug users by supporting the reduction of harm.

The issue of whether speech is supported by the same neural substrates as non-speech vocal-tract gestures has been contentious. In this fMRI study we tested whether producing non-speech vocal tract gestures in humans shares the same functional neuroanatomy as non-sense speech syllables. Production of non-speech vocal tract gestures, devoid of phonological content but similar to speech in that they had familiar acoustic and somatosensory targets, were compared to the production of speech sylla...

Full Text Available Dereverberation is required in various speech processing applications such as handsfree telephony and voice-controlled systems, especially when signals are applied that are recorded in a moderately or highly reverberant environment. In this paper, we compare a number of classical and more recently developed multimicrophone dereverberation algorithms, and validate the different algorithmic settings by means of two performance indices and a speech recognition system. It is found that some of the classical solutions obtain a moderate signal enhancement. More advanced subspace-based dereverberation techniques, on the other hand, fail to enhance the signals despite their high-computational load.

In this book, we introduce the background and mainstream methods of probabilistic modeling and discriminative parameter optimization for speech recognition. The specific models treated in depth include the widely used exponential-family distributions and the hidden Markov model. A detailed study is presented on unifying the common objective functions for discriminative learning in speech recognition, namely maximum mutual information (MMI), minimum classification error, and minimum phone/word error. The unification is presented, with rigorous mathematical analysis, in a common rational-functio

Full Text Available The article studies a grammatical aspect of developing stylistic competence of students of linguistic departments. Particularly, the stylistic competence which is defined as a capacity to create adequate utterances under natural conditions of communication according to a concrete situation is characterized. To highlight the importance of acquiring stylistic competence the levels of speech development of an individual are indentified and the stages of teaching grammar are differentiated. The approaches to teaching stylistic grammar are characterized within a communicative framework and relevant skills are elucidated. The role of functional styles in teaching a foreign language is clarified. The idea of teaching students to be able to make register shifts and mixture of speech registers in the process of foreign language competence acquiring are highlihgted. The theoretical principles are illustrated with the appropriate examples of exercises.

Full Text Available While the phenomenon of so-called “foreign fighters” is in no way new the past thirty-plus years has shown a marked increase in the numbers of individuals traveling abroad to fight in civil conflicts in the Muslim world. The crisis in Syria (2011-present has created a massive influx of such individuals going to fight. Of particular concern in western capitals has been the numbers of individuals from those countries that have gone to fight in that conflict which has since crossed the border into neighboring Iraq with the establishment of the socalled “Islamic State” and threatens to broaden the conflict into a larger regional sectarian conflagration. While the numbers of such participants from Western Europe have been greater than those who have gone from the United States and Canada there are legitimate concerns in both Washington, DC, and Ottawa about American and Canadian citizens who have gone—or attempted to go—to fight there and in other locales such as the Maghreb and Somalia. The analysis here will provide some background on the foreign fighter phenomenon, discuss the foreign fighter flow model, explore the issue from both Canadian and US perspectives to include providing details of some original research categorizing the characteristics of a small sample of US and Canadian fighters and those who attempted to go and fight, discuss how both governments have attempted to deal with the issue, and offer some policy prescription for dealing with this issue that is of importance to both international security writ large and domestic security in the US and Canada.

The use of EM radiation in conjunction with simultaneously recorded acoustic speech information enables a complete mathematical coding of acoustic speech. The methods include the forming of a feature vector for each pitch period of voiced speech and the forming of feature vectors for each time frame of unvoiced, as well as for combined voiced and unvoiced speech. The methods include how to deconvolve the speech excitation function from the acoustic speech output to describe the transfer function each time frame. The formation of feature vectors defining all acoustic speech units over well defined time frames can be used for purposes of speech coding, speech compression, speaker identification, language-of-speech identification, speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech translation, speech telephony, and speech teaching. 35 figs

The use of EM radiation in conjunction with simultaneously recorded acoustic speech information enables a complete mathematical coding of acoustic speech. The methods include the forming of a feature vector for each pitch period of voiced speech and the forming of feature vectors for each time frame of unvoiced, as well as for combined voiced and unvoiced speech. The methods include how to deconvolve the speech excitation function from the acoustic speech output to describe the transfer function each time frame. The formation of feature vectors defining all acoustic speech units over well defined time frames can be used for purposes of speech coding, speech compression, speaker identification, language-of-speech identification, speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech translation, speech telephony, and speech teaching.

of Capability-Expectations Gap in the study of European foreign policy. Through examples from relevant literature, Larsen not only demonstrates how this concept sets up standards for the EU as a foreign policy actor (that are not met by most other international actors) but also shows how this curtails analysis...... of EU foreign policy. The author goes on to discuss how the widespread use of the concept of ‘gap' affects the way in which EU foreign policy has been studied; and that it always produces the same result: the EU is an unfulfilled actor outside the realm of “normal” actors in IR. This volume offers new...... perspectives on European foreign policy research and advice and serves as an invaluable resource for students of EU foreign policy and, more broadly, European Studies....

Purpose: The authors investigated the relationship between the intelligibility and comprehension of speech presented in babble noise. Method: Forty participants listened to French imperative sentences (commands for moving objects) in a multitalker babble background for which intensity was experimentally controlled. Participants were instructed to…

Spectral integration (or formant averaging) was proposed in vowel perception research to account for the observation that a reduction of the intensity of one of two closely spaced formants (as in /u/) produced a predictable shift in vowel quality [Delattre et al., Word 8, 195-210 (1952)]. A related observation was reported in psychoacoustics, indicating that when the components of a two-tone periodic complex differ in amplitude and frequency, its perceived pitch is shifted toward that of the more intense tone [Helmholtz, App. XIV (1875/1948)]. Subsequent research in both fields focused on the frequency interval that separates these two spectral components, in an attempt to determine the size of the bandwidth for spectral integration to occur. This talk will review the accumulated evidence for and against spectral integration within the hypothesized limit of 3.5 Bark for static and dynamic signals in speech perception and psychoacoustics. Based on similarities in the processing of speech and non-speech sounds, it is suggested that spectral integration may reflect a general property of the auditory system. A larger frequency bandwidth, possibly close to 3.5 Bark, may be utilized in integrating acoustic information, including speech, complex signals, or sound quality of a violin.

Standard articulation tests are not always sensitive enough to discriminate between speech samples which are of high intelligibility. One can increase the sensitivity of such tests by presenting the test materials in noise. In this way, small differences in intelligibility can be magnified into

After two successful years at SIGIR in 2007 and 2008, the third workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2009) was held conjunction with the ACM Multimedia 2009. The goal of the SSCS series is to serve as a forum that brings together the disciplines that collaborate on spoken

from movements of certain organs with his (man‟s) throat and mouth…. By means ... In other words, government engages language; and how this affects the ... address the audience in a social gathering in order to have a new dawn. ..... Agbedo, C. U. Speech Act Analysis of Political discourse in the Nigerian Print Media in.

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is diagnosed on the basis of specific speech characteristics, in the absence of problems in hearing, intelligence, and language comprehension. This does not preclude the possibility that children with this speech disorder might demonstrate additional problems. Method: Cognitive functions were investigated…

Listeners adjust their phonetic categories to cope with variations in the speech signal (phonetic recalibration). Previous studies have shown that lipread speech (and word knowledge) can adjust the perception of ambiguous speech and can induce phonetic adjustments (Bertelson, Vroomen, & de Gelder in

In light of the U.S. Senate's designation of March 15, 2016 as "National Speech and Debate Education Day" (S. Res. 398, 2016), it only seems fitting that "Communication Education" devote a special section to the role of speech and debate in civic education. Speech and debate have been at the heart of the communication…

The experimental addition of speech output to computer-based Esperanto lessons using speech synthesized from text is described. Because of Esperanto's phonetic spelling and simple rhythm, it is particularly easy to describe the mechanisms of Esperanto synthesis. Attention is directed to how the text-to-speech conversion is performed and the ways…

on speech production characteristics, but also helps in accurate analysis of speech. .... include time delay estimation, speech enhancement from single and multi- ...... log. (. E[k]. ∑K−1 l=0. E[l]. ) ,. (7) where K is the number of samples in the ...

This book is written as a guide to the understanding of the processes involved in human speech communication. Ten authorities contributed material to provide an introduction to the physiological aspects of speech production and reception, the acoustical aspects of speech production and transmission, the psychophysics of sound reception, the nature…

Combining information from the visual and auditory senses can greatly enhance intelligibility of natural speech. Integration of audiovisual speech signals is robust even when temporal offsets are present between the component signals. In the present study, we characterized the temporal integration window for speech and nonspeech stimuli with…

The aim of this article is to describe and classify a number of different forms of English reported speech (or thought), and subsequently to analyze and represent them within the theory of FDG. First, the most prototypical forms of reported speech are discussed (direct and indirect speech);

Purpose: Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is diagnosed on the basis of specific speech characteristics, in the absence of problems in hearing, intelligence, and language comprehension. This does not preclude the possibility that children with this speech disorder might demonstrate additional

This book focuses on the way in which public debate and legal practice intersect when it comes to the value of free speech and the need to regulate "offensive", "blasphemous" or "hate" speech, especially, though not exclusively where such speech is thought to be offensive to members of ethnic and

The exercise of freedom of speech within our nation has deteriorated. A practical value in teaching free speech is the possibility of restoring a commitment to its principles by educators. What must be taught is why freedom of speech is important, why it has been compromised, and the extent to which it has been compromised. Every technological…

With detailed discussion and invaluable video footage of 23 treatment interventions for speech sound disorders (SSDs) in children, this textbook and DVD set should be part of every speech-language pathologist's professional preparation. Focusing on children with functional or motor-based speech disorders from early childhood through the early…

This book provides a survey on wide-spread of employing wavelets analysis in different applications of speech processing. The author examines development and research in different application of speech processing. The book also summarizes the state of the art research on wavelet in speech processing.

THE GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT, AND ABNORMALITIES OF SPEECH IN CHILDHOOD ARE DESCRIBED IN THIS TEXT DESIGNED FOR PEDIATRICIANS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, EDUCATORS, MEDICAL STUDENTS, THERAPISTS, PATHOLOGISTS, AND PARENTS. THE NORMAL DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE IS DISCUSSED, INCLUDING THEORIES ON THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH IN MAN AND FACTORS INFLUENCING THE NORMAL…

The extensive empirical literature analyzing productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment to local firms provides inconclusive results. Some studies find that foreign presence has a positive impact on the productivity of domestic firms, while others find no evidence or a negative effect...... for industrialized countries in the 1990s. Transition economies may experience spillovers, but these have been declining in recent years. Keywords: developing countries, transition economies, spillovers, foreign direct investment, technology transfer, meta-analysis...

This article is devoted to the problem of franchising in Russia. The article informs about difficulties, which face foreign companies developing their business in our country. Doing business in franchising foreign companies have to overcome some challenges such as: obtain a credit, unpredictability of the economy and so on. But in spite of all these difficulties many foreign companies and Russian ones set up franchising in Russia and promote themselves at the Russian market, but never the les...

Prior research suggests more than 70% of undergraduates have experienced harm from other students' drinking. This study built on the literature by, first, investigating whether secondhand harm cluster into latent factors that reflect distinct but related types of harm. Second, given the paucity of research examining factors that increase students' vulnerability to secondhand harm, we examined dimensions from Castellanos-Ryan and Conrod's 4-factor personality model for alcohol disorders (impulsivity [IMP], sensation seeking [SS], hopelessness [HOP], anxiety sensitivity [AS]) as predictors of secondhand harm exposure. We also investigated the possible mediating role of students' own problematic alcohol use in explaining personality-secondhand harm relationships. An online survey was administered to 1,537 first-year Canadian undergraduates (68% women). Problematic alcohol use was measured by the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, and personality was measured by the Substance Use Risk Profile Scale. Eleven secondhand harm items were included. The secondhand harm clustered into 3 distinct but related factors: "strains" (e.g., interruption of sleep or study), "threats" (e.g., harassment or assault), and "interpersonal harm" (e.g., arguments with peers). Sixty-eight percent of respondents reported strains, 44% threats, and 64% interpersonal harm, and 35% reported experiencing all 3 types of harm, in the last term. All 4 personality dimensions were independently associated with greater secondhand harm exposure. HOP was directly associated with threats and interpersonal harm, and AS was directly associated with all 3 types of harm. SS and IMP were both indirectly associated with all 3 types of harm through students' own problematic alcohol use. In addition, IMP was directly related to threats. The prevalence of secondhand harm from alcohol is high among undergraduates. Findings suggest that distinct personality risks may predispose students to experience secondhand

At the occasion of delivering the fiscal year 2003 policy speech, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proposed to double foreign direct investment (hereafter, FDI) stock into Japan within five years to revitalize the Japanese economy. Against this background, various measures aimed at promoting FDI into Japan have been investigated and implemented by the government and concerned ministries. A number of significant measures implemented in the most recent years to improve the investment environmen...

Health has long been intertwined with the foreign policies of states. In recent years, however, global health issues have risen to the highest levels of international politics and have become accepted as legitimate issues in foreign policy. This elevated political priority is in many ways a welcome development for proponents of global health, and it has resulted in increased funding for and attention to select global health issues. However, there has been less examination of the tensions that characterize the relationship between global health and foreign policy and of the potential effects of linking global health efforts with the foreign-policy interests of states. In this paper, the authors review the relationship between global health and foreign policy by examining the roles of health across 4 major components of foreign policy: aid, trade, diplomacy, and national security. For each of these aspects of foreign policy, the authors review current and historical issues and discuss how foreign-policy interests have aided or impeded global health efforts. The increasing relevance of global health to foreign policy holds both opportunities and dangers for global efforts to improve health. PMID:20423936

Health has long been intertwined with the foreign policies of states. In recent years, however, global health issues have risen to the highest levels of international politics and have become accepted as legitimate issues in foreign policy. This elevated political priority is in many ways a welcome development for proponents of global health, and it has resulted in increased funding for and attention to select global health issues. However, there has been less examination of the tensions that characterize the relationship between global health and foreign policy and of the potential effects of linking global health efforts with the foreign-policy interests of states. In this paper, the authors review the relationship between global health and foreign policy by examining the roles of health across 4 major components of foreign policy: aid, trade, diplomacy, and national security. For each of these aspects of foreign policy, the authors review current and historical issues and discuss how foreign-policy interests have aided or impeded global health efforts. The increasing relevance of global health to foreign policy holds both opportunities and dangers for global efforts to improve health.

a Factorial Hidden Markov Model, with non-stationary assumptions on the source autocorrelations modelled through the Factorial Hidden Markov Model, leads to separation in the monaural case. By extending Hansens work we find that Roweis' assumptions are necessary for monaural speech separation. Furthermore we...

... for stuttering to change over time or for emotions and attitudes about your speech to change as you have new experiences. It is important for you to have a clear idea about your motivation for going to therapy because your reasons for ...

This paper discusses an implementation of four speech acts: assert, concede, request and challenge in a paraconsistent framework. A natural four-valued model of interaction yields multiple new cognitive situations. They are analyzed in the context of communicative relations, which partially replace

Argues for the continuation of liberal education over career-oriented programs. Defines liberal education as one that develops abilities that transcend occupational concerns, and that enables individuals to cope with shifts in values, vocations, careers, and the environment. Argues that speech communication makes a significant contribution to…

Mar 4, 2014 ... In reflecting on possible responses to this ... Through the actions of a prophet, as Philip Wogamen (1998:4) reasons, people are supposed to have a ... The main argument in this article is that the person called to prophetic speech needs to become ..... were like dumb bricks and blocks to be forcefully moved.

Continuous speech recognition (SR) is an emerging technology that allows direct digital transcription of dictated radiology reports. The SR systems are being widely deployed in the radiology community. This is a review of technical and practical issues that should be considered when implementing an SR system. (orig.)

Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed…

Mar 4, 2014 ... It is expected that people will be drawn into the reality of God by authentic prophetic speech, .... strands of the DNA molecule show themselves to be arranged ... explains, chemical patterns act like the letters of a code, .... viewing the self-reflection regarding the ministry of renewal from the .... Irresistible force.

Within a series of six qualitative studies over seven years, this research in instructing journalism students investigates whether or not covering foreign news from home via Internet technology can substitute foreign correspondents on-site to reduce costs. Co-orientation and decontextualization can be described as characteristic for virtual…

Full Text Available Speech is a means of communication which is intrinsically bimodal: the audio signal originates from the dynamics of the articulators. This paper reviews recent works in the field of audiovisual speech, and more specifically techniques developed to measure the level of correspondence between audio and visual speech. It overviews the most common audio and visual speech front-end processing, transformations performed on audio, visual, or joint audiovisual feature spaces, and the actual measure of correspondence between audio and visual speech. Finally, the use of synchrony measure for biometric identity verification based on talking faces is experimented on the BANCA database.

Galantucci, Fowler, and Turvey (2006) have claimed that perceiving speech is perceiving gestures and that the motor system is recruited for perceiving speech. We make the counter argument that perceiving speech is not perceiving gestures, that the motor system is not recruitedfor perceiving speech, and that speech perception can be adequately described by a prototypical pattern recognition model, the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). Empirical evidence taken as support for gesture and motor theory is reconsidered in more detail and in the framework of the FLMR Additional theoretical and logical arguments are made to challenge gesture and motor theory.

Full Text Available In this paper a method for speech quality estimation is evaluated by simulating the transfer of speech over packet switched and mobile networks. The proposed system uses Dynamic Time Warping algorithm for test and received speech comparison. Several tests have been made on a test speech sample of a single speaker with simulated packet (frame loss effects on the perceived speech. The achieved results have been compared with measured PESQ values on the used transmission channel and their correlation has been observed.

Full Text Available History of present illness: A 27-year-old female sustained an injury to her left hand after she tripped and fell on a vase. She presented to the emergency department (ED complaining of pain over the laceration. Upon examination, patient presented with multiple small abrasions of the medial aspect of the left 5thdigit that are minimally tender. Additionally, she has one 0.5cm linear laceration of the medial aspect of the 5thmetacarpal with severe tenderness in the area and palpable underlying foreign body. Significant findings: Left hand plain radiography demonstrated a subcutaneous foreign body medial to the 5thmetacarpal that is radiopaque, trapezoidal in shape, and measures approximately 11mm x 3mm. Discussion: Laceration repairs are amongst the most common procedures in the emergency department; however, consideration for foreign body is often underdiagnosed. Imaging is performed in only about 11% of all traumatic wounds in the ED.1 Of those injuries relating to the hand that are subsequently imaged, about 15% are found to have a foreign body.2,3 Additionally, it is estimated that foreign bodies are present in 7% to 8.7% of all wounds caused by glass objects.4,5 Glass is among the most common foreign bodies in lacerations, and fortunately they are radiopaque and relatively well visualized radiographically. It has been demonstrated that 2mm glass foreign bodies have a 99% detection rate with radiography, and 1mm glass foreign bodies an 83% detection rate.6 Patient perception of foreign body has a positive predictive value of 31%, making it a poor source in influencing clinical decision-making to obtain wound radiographs.3 Clinicians should have a high suspicion for foreign body in lacerations, particularly those caused by glass, and utilize close physical examination and imaging for evaluation. Topics: Radiography, glass, foreign body, trauma

We present the results of studies designed to measure the segmental intelligibility of eight text-to-speech systems and a natural speech control, using the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT). Results indicated that the voices tested could be grouped into four categories: natural speech, high-quality synthetic speech, moderate-quality synthetic speech, and low-quality synthetic speech. The overall performance of the best synthesis system, DECtalk-Paul, was equivalent to natural speech only in terms of performance on initial consonants. The findings are discussed in terms of recent work investigating the perception of synthetic speech under more severe conditions. Suggestions for future research on improving the quality of synthetic speech are also considered.

We present the results of studies designed to measure the segmental intelligibility of eight text-to-speech systems and a natural speech control, using the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT). Results indicated that the voices tested could be grouped into four categories: natural speech, high-quality synthetic speech, moderate-quality synthetic speech, and low-quality synthetic speech. The overall performance of the best synthesis system, DECtalk-Paul, was equivalent to natural speech only in terms of performance on initial consonants. The findings are discussed in terms of recent work investigating the perception of synthetic speech under more severe conditions. Suggestions for future research on improving the quality of synthetic speech are also considered. PMID:23225916

Data on suicides, attempted suicides and other self-harming behaviours that occurred in Italian prisons from 1990 to 2002 was studied on official records, as documented by the Ministry of Justice. Over the study interval, completed suicide rates in Italian prisons were constantly about ten times higher than among the general population, but over time they did not increase significantly despite nearly a doubling in the absolute number of inmates. The rate of completed suicides in overcrowded prisons was about ten times higher than in non-overcrowded ones. Attempted suicides were about ten times higher than completed suicides, with females being significantly more likely to attempt to take their own lives and males being more likely to complete suicide. Self-injuring acts without the intent to die involve about one in every ten individuals, with foreigners (non-EU citizens mostly) being twice as likely to self-harm than residents. A better identification of the people suffering from mental disorders and a reduction in prison overcrowding are two key issues that need to be implemented to reduce the impact of suicide and self-harming behaviours among convicts.

Speech entrainment (SE), the online mimicking of an audiovisual speech model, has been shown to increase speech fluency in patients with Broca's aphasia. However, not all individuals with aphasia benefit from SE. The purpose of this study was to identify patterns of cortical damage that predict a positive response SE's fluency-inducing effects. Forty-four chronic patients with left hemisphere stroke (15 female) were included in this study. Participants completed two tasks: 1) spontaneous speech production, and 2) audiovisual SE. Number of different words per minute was calculated as a speech output measure for each task, with the difference between SE and spontaneous speech conditions yielding a measure of fluency improvement. Voxel-wise lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) was used to relate the number of different words per minute for spontaneous speech, SE, and SE-related improvement to patterns of brain damage in order to predict lesion locations associated with the fluency-inducing response to speech entrainment. Individuals with Broca's aphasia demonstrated a significant increase in different words per minute during speech entrainment versus spontaneous speech. A similar pattern of improvement was not seen in patients with other types of aphasia. VLSM analysis revealed damage to the inferior frontal gyrus predicted this response. Results suggest that SE exerts its fluency-inducing effects by providing a surrogate target for speech production via internal monitoring processes. Clinically, these results add further support for the use of speech entrainment to improve speech production and may help select patients for speech entrainment treatment. PMID:25989443

CRITICISM OF GOVERNMENTAL POLICY RESTRICTING USE OF FOREIGN CONTRACT WORKERS ON AMERICAN FARMS IN 1965 EXPRESSES THREE POSSIBILITIES -- (1) A SEVERE DISRUPTION OF DOMESTIC FRUIT AND VEGETABLE PRODUCTION, (2) AN INCREASE OF AMERICAN INVESTMENT IN FOREIGN, PARTICULARLY MEXICAN, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION, AND (3) A LOSS OF UNITED STATES EXPORT MARKET…

Foreign language study at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences in Budapest aims to develop the ability to use the language as a native would in a particular business or profession, and to help the student become fully aware of the political, historical, sociological, and geographical background of the foreign country and the…

Full Text Available Objective: Ingested foreign bodies in gastrointestinal tract are a common event which can cause serious morbidity and mortality in the children and adult population. For this reason, early diagnosis and treatment are crucial for preventing these life threatening complications. In this study, we aimed to analyze the characteristics of the patients with upper gastrointestinal foreign bodies that were treated in our department. Methods: Patients diagnosed with upper gastrointestinal foreign bodies who were admitted to our hospital between February 2010 and August2013 were evaluated retrospectively. The data regarding their age, gender, clinical profile, type and localization of the esophageal foreign body, performed endoscopic procedure and initial symptoms of the patients were noted and analyzed statistically. Results: Thirty-eight patients with a diagnosis of gastrointestinal foreign body were included in this study. Of these patients, 21 were male and 17 were female. The youngest patient was 17 years old and the oldest patient was 79 years old. Most of the foreign bodies (%55.3 detected in the stomach. Food waste and metallic objects in 21 and 16 patients respectively. The most common complaint was dysphagia (%50. After endoscopic intervention three of the patients were directed to surgery. Conclusion: Early recognition and treatment of gastrointestinal foreign bodies is important as their complications are life threatening. The best method of removal of foreign bodies is controversial. Early management with upper gastrointestinal endoscopy is the most efficient and safe treatment method in current conditions.

May 11, 2011 ... presented with a sudden onset of total dysphagia and history of ingestion of foreign bodies was not volunteered by any despite direct questioning. Plain radiograph of the neck and chest in either case did not reveal presence of foreign body. Both were successfully removed through rigid oesophagoscopy.

A method of evaluating foreign trade security is considered based on horizontally integrated approach to research security issues, taking into account the conditions of management, factors, components and levels of external security. The work was based theories of security, economics, management theory, practice of state regulation of foreign trade.

This report presents an assessment of the extent to which foreign uranium may be available to United States utilities in the short term (through 1980), the intermediate term (1981--1985), and the long term (1986--95). All free world foreign uranium producers and prospects are included, with particular emphasis on Australia, Canada, southern Africa, France, and French-speaking Africa. The assessment includes reserves, resources, exploration and prospects; firm and potential production capacity and prospects; national policies and relevant political and economic conditions; foreign uranium demand; etc. Conclusions are: Foreign supply capability is greater than foreign demand in the near term. The current availability of uncommitted future Australian production presents an unusual opportunity for establishing commercial relations with very substantial producers. Foreign uranium contracts represent an increase in diversity of supply and access to resources but have less assurance of supply than do domestic contracts. However, uncertainties can frequently be accommodated within an overall procurement program, thereby retaining the diversity and price advantages of foreign procurement. The practice of market pricing of contracts reduces the incentives for foreign contracting

Full Text Available In today’s global age many people cross national borders in search of better work and more wages. According to IOM, more than 100 000 000 workers leave their homeland and migrate to another country for this reason. Europe and North America have already experienced increase in foreign labor for many decades but nowadays, it is very common to see foreign laborers in Asian countries. As the number of foreign laborers rapidly increased, however, so did many social problems in relation to these workers. No country is safe from or immune to such social problems in regards to the foreign workers especially with a much easier and more efficient transportation system. In case of South Korea, the history of foreign labor may not be as long as other nations but as of 2007, it boasts of more than 250 000 foreign laborers and is thus facing just as many social problems as well. In order to investigate such social issues, this article explores the history of foreign laborers and their current situation in South Korea. Furthermore, this artticle examines both internal and external factors which may have caused exponential growth of foreign labor market in South Korea in the past decade.

Empirical research has focused on export as a proxy for the exchange rate exposure and the use of foreign exchange derivatives as the instrument to deal with this exposure. This empirical study applies an integrated foreign exchange risk management approach with a particular focus on the role...

Full Text Available Discourse and media communication researchers pay attention to the fact that popular discursive and communicative practices have a tendency to hybridization and convergence. Discourse which is understood as language in use is flexible. Consequently, it turns out that one and the same text can represent several types of discourses. A vivid example of this tendency is revealed in American commencement speech / commencement address / graduation speech. A commencement speech is a speech university graduates are addressed with which in compliance with the modern trend is delivered by outstanding media personalities (politicians, athletes, actors, etc.. The objective of this study is to define the specificity of the realization of polydiscursive practices within commencement speech. The research involves discursive, contextual, stylistic and definitive analyses. Methodologically the study is based on the discourse analysis theory, in particular the notion of a discursive practice as a verbalized social practice makes up the conceptual basis of the research. This research draws upon a hundred commencement speeches delivered by prominent representatives of American society since 1980s till now. In brief, commencement speech belongs to institutional discourse public speech embodies. Commencement speech institutional parameters are well represented in speeches delivered by people in power like American and university presidents. Nevertheless, as the results of the research indicate commencement speech institutional character is not its only feature. Conceptual information analysis enables to refer commencement speech to didactic discourse as it is aimed at teaching university graduates how to deal with challenges life is rich in. Discursive practices of personal discourse are also actively integrated into the commencement speech discourse. More than that, existential discursive practices also find their way into the discourse under study. Commencement

Many papers have documented a wage premium in foreign-owned and large firms. However, there is very little formal theory in the literature and empirical analyses are typically not based on hypotheses which are rigorously derived from theory. This paper contributes to the theory-empirics gap...... by developing a model that allows for two "pure" explanations for the wage premium. The first is a heterogenous-worker explanation along the lines of Yeaple (2005), where firms that select more scaleintensive technologies select ex-ante more productive workers. In this case, the wage premium is a pure selection...... phenomenon. The second explanation builds on the heterogeneous-firm model of Melitz (2003) combined with on-the-job learning as in Markusen (2001). Productivity differences between firms are internalized by ex-ante homogeneous workers, so the wage premium is a pure learning phenomenon due to ex-post higher...

The extent to which the sleeping brain processes sensory information remains unclear. This is particularly true for continuous and complex stimuli such as speech, in which information is organized into hierarchically embedded structures. Recently, novel metrics for assessing the neural representation of continuous speech have been developed using noninvasive brain recordings that have thus far only been tested during wakefulness. Here we investigated, for the first time, the sleeping brain's capacity to process continuous speech at different hierarchical levels using a newly developed Concurrent Hierarchical Tracking (CHT) approach that allows monitoring the neural representation and processing-depth of continuous speech online. Speech sequences were compiled with syllables, words, phrases, and sentences occurring at fixed time intervals such that different linguistic levels correspond to distinct frequencies. This enabled us to distinguish their neural signatures in brain activity. We compared the neural tracking of intelligible versus unintelligible (scrambled and foreign) speech across states of wakefulness and sleep using high-density EEG in humans. We found that neural tracking of stimulus acoustics was comparable across wakefulness and sleep and similar across all conditions regardless of speech intelligibility. In contrast, neural tracking of higher-order linguistic constructs (words, phrases, and sentences) was only observed for intelligible speech during wakefulness and could not be detected at all during nonrapid eye movement or rapid eye movement sleep. These results suggest that, whereas low-level auditory processing is relatively preserved during sleep, higher-level hierarchical linguistic parsing is severely disrupted, thereby revealing the capacity and limits of language processing during sleep. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Despite the persistence of some sensory processing during sleep, it is unclear whether high-level cognitive processes such as speech

The emergency department is an important gateway for the treatment of self-harm patients. Nurses\\' attitudes towards patients who self-harm can be negative and often nurses experience frustration, helplessness, ambivalence and antipathy. Patients are often dissatisfied with the care provided, and meeting with positive or negative attitudes greatly influences whether they seek additional help. A quantitative design was utilised to measure emergency department nurses\\' attitudes towards deliberate self-harm. The \\'Self-Harm Antipathy Scale\\

Full Text Available This state-of-the art paper focuses on the poorly explored issue of foreign language aptitude, attempting to present the latest developments in this field and reconceptualizations of the construct from the perspective of neuroscience. In accordance with this goal, it first discusses general directions in neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude, starting with the earliest attempts to define the neurological substrate for talent, sources of difficulties in the neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude and modern research methods. This is followed by the discussion of the research on the phonology of foreign language aptitude with emphasis on functional and structural studies as well as their consequences for the knowledge of the concept. The subsequent section presents the studies which focus on lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of foreign language aptitude. The paper ends with a discussion of the limitations of contemporary research, the future directions of such research and selec ed methodological issues.

Organs for transplantation are an absolute scarcity throughout the world, and many countries do not offer transplantation. Developed countries with transplant programs receive requests to list foreign nationals for transplantation. Any national standard deserves justification by a thorough exploration of the issues. In this article, the issues regarding organ transplantation for foreign nationals in Canada are explored. Currently Canada has no policy on listing foreign nationals for transplantation. Three topics are reviewed: (1) arguments for and against the transplantation of organs from deceased donors to foreign nationals, (2) relevant legislation and position statements, and (3) relevant practices in other countries. Finally, practical policy options are suggested. This article's analysis of the issues will provide guidance for health care professionals and policy makers in Canada and developed countries exploring listing foreign nationals for transplantation.

Full Text Available We present an analysis of the emergence and development of written speech, its relationship to the oral speech, connections to the symbolic and modeling activities of preschool children – playing and drawing. While a child's drawing is traditionally interpreted in psychology either as a measure of intellectual development, or as a projective technique, or as a criterion for creative giftedness of the child, in this article, the artistic activity is analyzed as a prerequisite for development of written speech. The article substantiates the hypothesis that the mastery of “picture writing” – the ability to display the verbal content in a schematic picturesque plan – is connected to the success of writing speech at school age. Along with the classical works of L.S. Vygotsky, D.B. Elkonin, A.R. Luria, dedicated to finding the origins of writing, the article presents the current Russian and foreign frameworks of forming the preconditions of writing, based on the concepts of cultural-historical theory (“higher mental functions”, “zone of proximal development”, etc.. In Western psychology, a number of pilot studies used the developmental function of drawing for teaching the written skills to children of 5-7 years old. However, in cognitive psychology, relationship between drawing and writing is most often reduced mainly to the analysis of general motor circuits. Despite the recovery in research on writing and its origins in the last decade, either in domestic or in foreign psychology, the written speech is not a sufficiently studied problem.

The Self Harm Questionnaire (SHQ) aiming at identification of self-harm in adolescents has been developed and piloted in a sample of 12-17 year olds (n = 100). The adolescents were recruited from both in- and outpatient psychiatric services. Concurrent validity of the SHQ was evaluated by comparing the SHQ results with recorded self harm in the…

Summary.-This study was designed to examine negative pragmatic transfer of the speech act of English compliments by Chinese who learn English as a foreign language and to estimate the correlation between the amount of negative pragmatic transfer and English proficiency of the Chinese learners. Frequencies of students' performance showed that both in the favored compliments and the response strategies, differences were evident between Chinese English learners and native English speakers. This indicated that Chinese learners had trouble with the "slang" or "idioms" of the target language and tended to transfer negatively their L1 pragmatic norms to their L2 communication. Moreover, the favored compliment response strategies used by two groups of Chinese learners--who had different levels of English proficiency--differed, and negative pragmatic transfer decreased as proficiency in English increased.

This thesis deals with speech enhancement, i.e., noise reduction in speech signals. This has applications in, e.g., hearing aids and teleconference systems. We consider a signal-driven approach to speech enhancement where a model of the speech is assumed and filters are generated based...... on this model. The basic model used in this thesis is the harmonic model which is a commonly used model for describing the voiced part of the speech signal. We show that it can be beneficial to extend the model to take inharmonicities or the non-stationarity of speech into account. Extending the model...

Many of the items in the "Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing" scale questionnaire [S. Gatehouse and W. Noble, Int. J. Audiol. 43, 85-99 (2004)] are concerned with speech understanding in a variety of backgrounds, both speech and nonspeech. To study if this self-report data reflected informational masking, previously collected data on 414 people were analyzed. The lowest scores (greatest difficulties) were found for the two items in which there were two speech targets, with successively higher scores for competing speech (six items), energetic masking (one item), and no masking (three items). The results suggest significant masking by competing speech in everyday listening situations.

Full Text Available This present study investigated the link between speech-in-speech perception capacities and four executive function components: response suppression, inhibitory control, switching and working memory. We constructed a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm using a written target word and a spoken prime word, implemented in one of two concurrent auditory sentences (cocktail party situation. The prime and target were semantically related or unrelated. Participants had to perform a lexical decision task on visual target words and simultaneously listen to only one of two pronounced sentences. The attention of the participant was manipulated: The prime was in the pronounced sentence listened to by the participant or in the ignored one. In addition, we evaluate the executive function abilities of participants (switching cost, inhibitory-control cost and response-suppression cost and their working memory span. Correlation analyses were performed between the executive and priming measurements. Our results showed a significant interaction effect between attention and semantic priming. We observed a significant priming effect in the attended but not in the ignored condition. Only priming effects obtained in the ignored condition were significantly correlated with some of the executive measurements. However, no correlation between priming effects and working memory capacity was found. Overall, these results confirm, first, the role of attention for semantic priming effect and, second, the implication of executive functions in speech-in-noise understanding capacities.

on account of international tax evasion mayprevent the overall saving-investment tax wedge from becoming too high, and hencemay be beneficial for moderate preferences for public goods. A world with 'high-spending' governments, in contrast, is made worse off by the loss of saving taxes,and hence stands...... are financed by taxes on savingand investment. There is international cross-ownership of firms, and countries areassumed to be unable to tax away pure profits. Countries then face an incentiveto impose a rather high investment tax also borne by foreigners. In this setting,the loss of the saving tax instrument...

Full Text Available The paper considers the problem of bilingualism and its effect on the personality of the speaker. Various types of bilingualism are described along with the factors determining the bilingual competence formation: age, individual experience, socio-cultural conditions of the native and foreign language interaction. The author points out both the positive and negative impact on the native language as the result of the second language learning. The special emphasis is on language interference in the process of learning a foreign language. To make sure the students achieve the adequate degree of its authenticity, and therefore the bilingual competence, the teacher should take into account the specificity of national styles, communicative strategies and speech tactics of both languages. A comparative analysis of linguistic differences of the English and Russian languages is demonstrated on the level of phonetics, vocabulary, grammar and national communicative stylistics. The author maintains that successful inter-language and cross-cultural communication requires the integrative cross-disciplinary approach, consolidation of the linguistic theory and methods of foreign language teaching.

Full Text Available Introduction: The aim of the study was to assess the level of awareness of smoking and non smoking students on harmful impact of nicotine and cigarette smoke on human body. Material and methods: The study was carried out in March 2011 in high schools in Szczecin. Own elaborated questionnaire was used. 288 students from high school, technical college and vocational school were tested. Results: The majority of responders (95,1% claimed that cigarette smoke is harmful both for passive and active smokers. They most often pinpoint the direct cause connected with smoking to pulmonary diseases (264 persons and cancers (240 persons. Almost 90% of students found negative impact of tobacco products on development of fetus of pregnant women. Overwhelming majority of respondents (83,2% feels anxious if it comes to stay in a room filled with smoke. Conclusions: The awareness of high school students on negative influence of smoking on human body is quite satisfactory, but there is still a need for more education in the range of diseases and symptoms connected with smoking.

Full Text Available New innovations and advances in science and technology in the present day have made considerable and significant changes in the lifestyle of people all around the globe. Communication from one part of the world to another is possible at the hit of a button . Social networking is being rampantly used everywhere and by everybody, be it youngsters or the older generation. Facebook and Whatsapp are the most commonly used means of communication in social networking at present. Smart phones functioning as minicomp uters with fast internet connectivity in the pockets of today’s technosavy generation have made them create and spend most of their time interacting with people in a virtual world. There is an urgent need to understand the dynamics of social media and its effects on the lifestyle of people. Studies documenting the same have been very few. This study was conducted to understand the benefits and harms towards health and academics of MBBS students. This cross - sectional study on 147 MBBS students revealed inter esting findings and opinions of the students. Effects of Facebook and What Sapp on productivity and sleep disturbances due to it were the significant findings of the study. Facebook and Whatsapp can be considered both beneficial and harmful and it solely d epends on how it is being put to use

Full Text Available Objective. Trichloroacetic acid (TCAA, or trichloroethanoic acid, is a chemical analogue of acetic acid where three methyl group hydrogen atoms are replaced by chlorine. TCAAs are also abbreviated and referred to as TCAs, causing confusion with the psychiatric antidepressant drug class, especially among patients. TCAAs exist in dermatological treatments such as chemical peels or wart chemoablation medication. TCAA ingestion or overdose can cause gastric irritation symptoms including vomiting, diarrhea, or lassitude. This symptomatology is less severe than TCA overdose, where symptoms may include elevated body temperature, blurred vision, dilated pupils, sleepiness, confusion, seizures, rapid heart rate, and cardiac arrest. Owing to the vast difference in symptoms, the need for clinical intervention differs greatly. While overdose of either in a self-harm attempt can warrant psychiatric hospital admission, the risk of death in TCAA ingestion is far less. Case Report. A patient ingested TCAA in the form of a commercially available dermatological chemical peel as a self-harm attempt, thinking that it was a more injurious TCA. Conclusion. Awareness among physicians, particularly psychiatrists, regarding this relatively obscure chemical compound (TCAA and its use by suicidal patients mistakenly believing it to be a substance that can be significantly more lethal (TCA, is imperative.

Full Text Available Background: Harm ratings of substances help in understanding the perception toward substance use and formulating policies. Evidence of such harm ratings by substance users and their caregivers provides a clearer perspective of those who experience and observe such harm closely. Materials and Methods: Substance users and their caregivers were recruited from the Drug De-addiction and Treatment Centre of PGIMER, Chandigarh. Sociodemographic details of the subjects were noted. The subjects were then asked to rate a list of psychoactive preparations according to the harms they thought the preparation caused. The list of substances was developed taking into consideration substance commonly encountered in the geographical area. The harm ratings were transformed on a scale of 0-100. Results: All subjects were males and majority of them were educated above 10 th standard, were not employed and belonged to urban background. Most of them had taken psychoactive substances in their lifetimes but were currently abstinent. Most of the subjects endorsed intravenous drugs as the most harmful, followed by heroin. Beer and chewable tobacco considered the least harmful substances. Greater degree of education was associated with lower harm rankings for heroin, cannabis, dextropropoxyphene, and raw opium; while urban residence was associated with greater harm ratings for cannabis and raw opium. Differences in the harms were perceived for different preparations of the same active compound for alcohol and nicotine. Conclusion: Harm ratings of substances can be a useful guide while formulating policies and allocating resources. Need for further research extending this pilot study is emphasized.

This presentation discusses the following issues: (1) Good vs harmful tax competition?, (2) How to identify harmful competition?, (3) What is the economic and social impact of harmful tax competition?, (4) What can be done about harmful tax competition? There are three levels, the EU level, the OECD level and the global level. Existing measures to counteract harmful tax practices are insufficient because action by one country merely shifts activity to another country and puts its tax payers at a competitive disadvantage and because coordination action eases political pressure. The EU code of good conduct and the OECD guidelines for dealing with harmful preferential tax regimes are compared, with respect to general features, with respect to key factors to identify harmful measures, and with respect to general scope.

One of the lasting concerns in audiology is the unexplained individual differences in speech perception performance even for individuals with similar audiograms. One proposal is that there are cognitive/perceptual individual differences underlying this vulnerability and that these differences are present in normal hearing (NH) individuals but do not reveal themselves in studies that use clear speech produced in quiet (because of a ceiling effect). However, previous studies have failed to uncover cognitive/perceptual variables that explain much of the variance in NH performance on more challenging degraded speech tasks. This lack of strong correlations may be due to either examining the wrong measures (e.g., working memory capacity) or to there being no reliable differences in degraded speech performance in NH listeners (i.e., variability in performance is due to measurement noise). The proposed project has 3 aims; the first, is to establish whether there are reliable individual differences in degraded speech performance for NH listeners that are sustained both across degradation types (speech in noise, compressed speech, noise-vocoded speech) and across multiple testing sessions. The second aim is to establish whether there are reliable differences in NH listeners' ability to adapt their phonetic categories based on short-term statistics both across tasks and across sessions; and finally, to determine whether performance on degraded speech perception tasks are correlated with performance on phonetic adaptability tasks, thus establishing a possible explanatory variable for individual differences in speech perception for NH and hearing impaired listeners.

The influence of speech production on speech perception is well established in adults. However, because adults have a long history of both perceiving and producing speech, the extent to which the perception-production linkage is due to experience is unknown. We addressed this issue by asking whether articulatory configurations can influence infants' speech perception performance. To eliminate influences from specific linguistic experience, we studied preverbal, 6-mo-old infants and tested the discrimination of a nonnative, and hence never-before-experienced, speech sound distinction. In three experimental studies, we used teething toys to control the position and movement of the tongue tip while the infants listened to the speech sounds. Using ultrasound imaging technology, we verified that the teething toys consistently and effectively constrained the movement and positioning of infants' tongues. With a looking-time procedure, we found that temporarily restraining infants' articulators impeded their discrimination of a nonnative consonant contrast but only when the relevant articulator was selectively restrained to prevent the movements associated with producing those sounds. Our results provide striking evidence that even before infants speak their first words and without specific listening experience, sensorimotor information from the articulators influences speech perception. These results transform theories of speech perception by suggesting that even at the initial stages of development, oral-motor movements influence speech sound discrimination. Moreover, an experimentally induced "impairment" in articulator movement can compromise speech perception performance, raising the question of whether long-term oral-motor impairments may impact perceptual development.

The debate about the causal role of the motor system in speech perception has been reignited by demonstrations that motor processes are engaged during the processing of speech sounds. Here, we evaluate which aspects of auditory speech processing are affected, and which are not, in a stroke patient with dysfunction of the speech motor system. We found that the patient showed a normal phonemic categorical boundary when discriminating two non-words that differ by a minimal pair (e.g., ADA-AGA). However, using the same stimuli, the patient was unable to identify or label the non-word stimuli (using a button-press response). A control task showed that he could identify speech sounds by speaker gender, ruling out a general labelling impairment. These data suggest that while the motor system is not causally involved in perception of the speech signal, it may be used when other cues (e.g., meaning, context) are not available.

Hereditary ataxia syndromes can result in significant speech impairment, a symptom thought to be responsive to treatment. The type of speech impairment most commonly reported in hereditary ataxias is dysarthria. Dysarthria is a collective term referring to a group of movement disorders affecting the muscular control of speech. Dysarthria affects the ability of individuals to communicate and to participate in society. This in turn reduces quality of life. Given the harmful impact of speech disorder on a person's functioning, treatment of speech impairment in these conditions is important and evidence-based interventions are needed. To assess the effects of interventions for speech disorder in adults and children with Friedreich ataxia and other hereditary ataxias. On 14 October 2013, we searched the Cochrane Neuromuscular Disease Group Specialized Register, CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL Plus, PsycINFO, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), Dissertation Abstracts and trials registries. We checked all references in the identified trials to identify any additional published data. We considered for inclusion randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or quasi-RCTs that compared treatments for hereditary ataxias with no treatment, placebo or another treatment or combination of treatments, where investigators measured speech production. Two review authors independently selected trials for inclusion, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies using the standard methodological procedures expected by The Cochrane Collaboration. The review authors collected information on adverse effects from included studies. We did not conduct a meta-analysis as no two studies utilised the same assessment procedures within the same treatment. Fourteen clinical trials, involving 721 participants, met the criteria for inclusion in the review. Thirteen studies compared a pharmaceutical treatment with placebo (or a

Full Text Available The speech is a tool for accurate communication of ideas. When we talk about speech prevention as a practical realization of the language, we are referring to the fact that it should be comprised of the elements of the criteria as viewed from the perspective of the standards. This criteria, in the broad sense of the word, presupposes an exact realization of the thought expressed between the speaker and the recipient.The absence of this criterion catches the eye through the practical realization of the language and brings forth consequences, often hidden very deeply in the human psyche. Their outer manifestation already represents a delayed reaction of the social environment. The foundation for overcoming and standardization of this phenomenon must be the anatomy-physiological patterns of the body, accomplished through methods in concordance with the nature of the body.

We show that the rate of aerosol particle emission during healthy human speech is strongly correlated with the loudness (amplitude) of vocalization. Emission rates range from approximately 1 to 50 particles per second for quiet to loud amplitudes, regardless of language spoken (English, Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic). Intriguingly, a small fraction of individuals behave as ``super emitters,'' consistently emitting an order of magnitude more aerosol particles than their peers. We interpret the results in terms of the eggressive flowrate during vocalization, which is known to vary significantly for different types of vocalization and for different individuals. The results suggest that individual speech patterns could affect the probability of airborne disease transmission. The results also provide a possible explanation for the existence of ``super spreaders'' who transmit pathogens much more readily than average and who play a key role in the spread of epidemics.

Provisions within the HITECH Act require that covered entities notify individuals if their protected health information is breached. However, the current regulation allows an exemption if the risk of harm is slight. Assessing risk can be subjective, and privacy officers have been working to create methods to conduct and document their analyses.

This study developed a multilevel model of the interpersonal harming behavior associated with social comparison processes in work teams. We tested this model using temporally lagged data from a sample of student teams (Study 1) and cross-sectional data from a sample of work teams in a

The Speech Cycling Task is a novel experimental paradigm developed together with Robert Port and Keiichi Tajima at Indiana University. In a task of this sort, subjects repeat a phrase containing multiple prominent, or stressed, syllables in time with an auditory metronome, which can be simple or complex. A phase-based collective variable is defined in the acoustic speech signal. This paper reports on two experiments using speech cycling which together reveal many of the hallmarks of hierarchically coupled oscillatory processes. The first experiment requires subjects to place the final stressed syllable of a small phrase at specified phases within the overall Phrase Repetition Cycle (PRC). It is clearly demonstrated that only three patterns, characterized by phases around 1/3, 1/2 or 2/3 are reliably produced, and these points are attractors for other target phases. The system is thus multistable, and the attractors correspond to stable couplings between the metrical foot and the PRC. A second experiment examines the behavior of these attractors at increased rates. Faster rates lead to mode jumps between attractors. Previous experiments have also illustrated hysteresis as the system moves from one mode to the next. The dynamical organization is particularly interesting from a modeling point of view, as there is no single part of the speech production system which cycles at the level of either the metrical foot or the phrase repetition cycle. That is, there is no continuous kinematic observable in the system. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence that the oscopic behavior of the entire production system is correctly described as hierarchically coupled oscillators. There are many parallels between this organization and the forms of inter-limb coupling observed in locomotion and rhythmic manual tasks.

Full Text Available It has been suggested that intra- and inter-speaker variability in speech are correlated. Interlocutors have been shown to converge on various phonetic dimensions. In addition, speakers imitate the phonetic properties of voices they are exposed to in shadowing, repetition, and even passive listening tasks. We review three theoretical accounts of speech imitation and convergence phenomena: (i the Episodic Theory (ET of speech perception and production (Goldinger, 1998; (ii the Motor Theory (MT of speech perception (Liberman and Whalen, 2000;Galantucci et al., 2006 ; (iii Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT; Giles et al., 1991;Giles and Coupland, 1991. We argue that no account is able to explain all the available evidence. In particular, there is a need to integrate low-level, mechanistic accounts (like ET and MT and higher-level accounts (like CAT. We propose that this is possible within the framework of an integrated theory of production and comprehension (Pickering & Garrod, in press. Similarly to both ET and MT, this theory assumes parity between production and perception. Uniquely, however, it posits that listeners simulate speakers’ utterances by computing forward-model predictions at many different levels, which are then compared to the incoming phonetic input. In our account phonetic imitation can be achieved via the same mechanism that is responsible for sensorimotor adaptation; i.e. the correction of prediction errors. In addition, the model assumes that the degree to which sensory prediction errors lead to motor adjustments is context-dependent. The notion of context subsumes both the preceding linguistic input and non-linguistic attributes of the situation (e.g., the speaker’s and listener’s social identities, their conversational roles, the listener’s intention to imitate.

enough from the truth. Subjects were then interviewed individually in a sound booth to obtain “norming” speech data, pre- interview. We also...e.g. pitch, intensity, speaking rate, voice quality), gender, ethnicity and personality information, our machine learning experiments can classify...Have you ever been in trouble with the police?” vs. open-ended (e.g. “What is the last movie you saw that you really hated ?”) DISTRIBUTION A

For many speech telecommunication technologies a robust speech activity detector is important. An audio-only speech detector will givefalse positives when the interfering signal is speech or has speech characteristics. The modality video is suitable to solve this problem. In this report the approach

This report describes three extensions to a classification system for paediatric speech sound disorders termed the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS). Part I describes a classification extension to the SDCS to differentiate motor speech disorders from speech delay and to differentiate among three sub-types of motor speech disorders.…

This paper presents evidence that six of the seven parts of speech occur in written text as Poisson processes, simple or recurring. The six major parts are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, with the interjection occurring too infrequently to support a model. The data consist of more than the first 5000 words of works by four major authors coded to label the parts of speech, as well as periods (sentence terminators). Sentence length is measured via the period and found to be normally distributed with no stochastic model identified for its occurrence. The models for all six speech parts but the noun significantly distinguish some pairs of authors and likewise for the joint use of all words types. Any one author is significantly distinguished from any other by at least one word type and sentence length very significantly distinguishes each from all others. The variety of word type use, measured by Shannon entropy, builds to about 90% of its maximum possible value. The rate constants for nouns are close to the fractions of maximum entropy achieved. This finding together with the stochastic models and the relations among them suggest that the noun may be a primitive organizer of written text.

This research reported a comparison from a success rate of speech recognition systems that used two types of databases they were existing databases and new databases, that were implemented into quadcopter as motion control. Speech recognition system was using Mel frequency cepstral coefficient method (MFCC) as feature extraction that was trained using recursive neural network method (RNN). MFCC method was one of the feature extraction methods that most used for speech recognition. This method has a success rate of 80% - 95%. Existing database was used to measure the success rate of RNN method. The new database was created using Indonesian language and then the success rate was compared with results from an existing database. Sound input from the microphone was processed on a DSP module with MFCC method to get the characteristic values. Then, the characteristic values were trained using the RNN which result was a command. The command became a control input to the single board computer (SBC) which result was the movement of the quadcopter. On SBC, we used robot operating system (ROS) as the kernel (Operating System).

This report contains pertinent information on the status, objectives, budgets, major projects and facilities, as well as user, industrial and governmental organizations involved in major foreign gas-cooled thermal reactor programs. This is the second issue of this document (the first was issued in March 1979). The format has been revised to consolidate material according to country. These sections are followed by the foreign HTGR program index which serves as a quick reference to some of the many acronyms associated with the foreign HTGR programs

Purpose: The goal of this article is to introduce the pause marker (PM), a single-sign diagnostic marker proposed to discriminate early or persistent childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) from speech delay.

Full Text Available The authors analyse the effect of speech rate variation on Afrikaans phone stability from an acoustic perspective. Specifically they introduce two techniques for the acoustic analysis of speech rate variation, apply these techniques to an Afrikaans...

In the development process of modern telecommunication systems, such as mobile phones, it is common practice to use computer models to objectively evaluate the transmission quality of the system, instead of time-consuming perceptual listening tests. Such models have typically focused on the quality...... of the transmitted speech, while little or no attention has been provided to speech intelligibility. The present study investigated to what extent three state-of-the art speech intelligibility models could predict the intelligibility of noisy speech transmitted through mobile phones. Sentences from the Danish...... Dantale II speech material were mixed with three different kinds of background noise, transmitted through three different mobile phones, and recorded at the receiver via a local network simulator. The speech intelligibility of the transmitted sentences was assessed by six normal-hearing listeners...

Primary progressive aphasia is a neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by progressive language dysfunction. The majority of primary progressive aphasia cases can be classified into three subtypes: nonfluent/agrammatic, semantic, and logopenic variants. Each variant presents with unique clinical features, and is associated with distinctive underlying pathology and neuroimaging findings. Unlike primary progressive aphasia, apraxia of speech is a disorder that involves inaccurate production of sounds secondary to impaired planning or programming of speech movements. Primary progressive apraxia of speech is a neurodegenerative form of apraxia of speech, and it should be distinguished from primary progressive aphasia given its discrete clinicopathological presentation. Recently, there have been substantial advances in our understanding of these speech and language disorders. The clinical, neuroimaging, and histopathological features of primary progressive aphasia and apraxia of speech are reviewed in this article. The distinctions among these disorders for accurate diagnosis are increasingly important from a prognostic and therapeutic standpoint. Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.

This book presents recent advances in nonlinear speech processing beyond nonlinear techniques. It shows that it exploits heuristic and psychological models of human interaction in order to succeed in the implementations of socially believable VUIs and applications for human health and psychological support. The book takes into account the multifunctional role of speech and what is “outside of the box” (see Björn Schuller’s foreword). To this aim, the book is organized in 6 sections, each collecting a small number of short chapters reporting advances “inside” and “outside” themes related to nonlinear speech research. The themes emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling socially believable speech interfaces, ranging from efforts to capture the nature of sound changes in linguistic contexts and the timing nature of speech; labors to identify and detect speech features that help in the diagnosis of psychological and neuronal disease, attempts to improve the effectiveness and performa...

To address the challenges of non-cooperative and remote acoustic detection, an all-fiber laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) is established. The all-fiber LDV system can offer the advantages of smaller size, lightweight design and robust structure, hence it is a better fit for remote speech detection. In order to improve the performance and the efficiency of LDV for long-range hearing, the speech enhancement technology based on optimally modified log-spectral amplitude (OM-LSA) algorithm is used. The experimental results show that the comprehensible speech signals within the range of 150 m can be obtained by the proposed LDV. The signal-to-noise ratio ( SNR) and mean opinion score ( MOS) of the LDV speech signal can be increased by 100% and 27%, respectively, by using the speech enhancement technology. This all-fiber LDV, which combines the speech enhancement technology, can meet the practical demand in engineering.

Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions provides a comprehensive and forward-looking treatment of natural speech in the mobile environment. This fourteen-chapter anthology brings together lead scientists from Apple, Google, IBM, AT&T, Yahoo! Research and other companies, along with academicians, technology developers and market analysts. They analyze the growing markets for mobile speech, new methodological approaches to the study of natural language, empirical research findings on natural language and mobility, and future trends in mobile speech. Mobile Speech opens with a challenge to the industry to broaden the discussion about speech in mobile environments beyond the smartphone, to consider natural language applications across different domains. Among the new natural language methods introduced in this book are Sequence Package Analysis, which locates and extracts valuable opinion-related data buried in online postings; microintonation as a way to make TTS truly human-like; and se...

Full Text Available Opinion surveys on attitudes towards immigration are becoming more and more important, owing to the increasing role of political debate on migration issues in Western European countries. CNR has conducted four surveys on this topic, collecting data on the evolution of Italians attitudes towards migration issues. In fact, the ? rst survey was conducted in the second half of the eighties, when foreign immigration was in its early stages. The last survey took place in 2002, when immigration was already well established in Italy. The article focuses on three main issues: the global impact of immigration on Italian society, the immigrants role in the labour market, and immigration policy. In general, the results of the last survey con? rm a trend that appeared already in 1997, of more balanced and realistic opinion that were less of a response to circumstances perceived as special emergencies. Highly educated people, teachers and students continue to be the most open and receptive groups, whereas the less favourably inclined and more worried continue to be old people, those with less education, the unemployed, housewives, and retirees.

Full Text Available To improve short-horizon exchange rate forecasts, we employ foreign exchange market risk factors as fundamentals, and Bayesian treed Gaussian process (BTGP models to handle non-linear, time-varying relationships between these fundamentals and exchange rates. Forecasts from the BTGP model conditional on the carry and dollar factors dominate random walk forecasts on accuracy and economic criteria in the Meese-Rogoff setting. Superior market timing ability for large moves, more than directional accuracy, drives the BTGP’s success. We explain how, through a model averaging Monte Carlo scheme, the BTGP is able to simultaneously exploit smoothness and rough breaks in between-variable dynamics. Either feature in isolation is unable to consistently outperform benchmarks throughout the full span of time in our forecasting exercises. Trading strategies based on ex ante BTGP forecasts deliver the highest out-of-sample risk-adjusted returns for the median currency, as well as for both predictable, traded risk factors.

From its inception, biotechnology has been a uniquely international enterprise. An American and an Englishman working together elucidated the structure of DNA almost 50 years ago; more recently, the Human Genome Project linked researchers around the world, from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston to the Beijing Human Genome Center. Today our industry's researchers hail from African villages and Manhattan high rises; from Munich and Melbourne; from London, Ontario, and London, England; from Scotland and Nova Scotia--New Scotland; from Calcutta and Calgary. But in the beginning, the infrastructure that supported these efforts--intellectual property, venture capital, streamlined technology transfer--was less widely dispersed and the world's brightest biotech researchers clustered in only half a dozen scientific Meccas. Previous technological revolutions have spread around the world. Following in their footsteps, biotechnology's global diaspora seems inevitable, especially since governments are promoting it. But as our science and business emigrate from early strongholds in the United States, Canada and Europe across oceans and borders and into new cultures, international tensions over biotechnology continue to grow. In just the last few years, controversies have rolled over R&D spending priorities, genetic patents, bioprospecting, transgenic agriculture and drug pricing. My premise today is that our industry needs to formulate its first foreign policy, one which is cognizant of the miserable judgments and mistakes of other industries--and avoids them.

The five most commonly recognized Harmful Algal Bloom related illnesses include Ciguatera poisoning, Paralytic Shellfish poisoning, Neurotoxin Shellfish poisoning, Diarrheic Shellfish Poisoning and Amnesic Shellfish poisoning. Although they are each the product of different toxins, toxin assemblages or HAB precursors these clinical syndromes have much in common. Exposure occurs through the consumption of fish or shellfish; routine clinical tests are not available for diagnosis; there is no known antidote for exposure; and the risk of these illnesses can negatively impact local fishing and tourism industries. Thus, illness prevention is of paramount importance to minimize human and public health risks. To accomplish this, close communication and collaboration is needed among HAB scientists, public health researchers and local, state and tribal health departments at academic, community outreach, and policy levels.

The five most commonly recognized Harmful Algal Bloom related illnesses include Ciguatera poisoning, Paralytic Shellfish poisoning, Neurotoxin Shellfish poisoning, Diarrheic Shellfish Poisoning and Amnesic Shellfish poisoning. Although they are each the product of different toxins, toxin assemblages or HAB precursors these clinical syndromes have much in common. Exposure occurs through the consumption of fish or shellfish; routine clinical tests are not available for diagnosis; there is no known antidote for exposure; and the risk of these illnesses can negatively impact local fishing and tourism industries. Thus, illness prevention is of paramount importance to minimize human and public health risks. To accomplish this, close communication and collaboration is needed among HAB scientists, public health researchers and local, state and tribal health departments at academic, community outreach, and policy levels. PMID:27616971

The rapid technological advancement has increased human exposure to ionizing radiations enormously. Ionizing radiations produces deleterious effects in the living organisms. Widespread use of radiation in diagnosis therapy, industry, energy sector and inadvertent exposure during air and space travel, nuclear accidents and nuclear terror attacks requires safeguard against human exposures. Lead shielding and other physical measures can be used in such situations but with difficulty to manage; thus pharmacological intervention could be the most prudent strategy to protect humans against the harmful effect of ionizing radiations. These pharmacological agents are radioprotectives; The development of radioprotective agents has been the subject of intense research in view of their potential for use within a radiation environment. However, no ideal, safe synthetic radio protectors are available to date, so the search for alternative sources including plants has been ongoing. In Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine, several plants have been used to treat free radical-mediated ailments and, therefore, it is logical to expect that such plants may also render some protection against radiation damage. This all is due to antioxidant enzymes, nitroxides, and melatonin, antiemetic, anti-inflammatory. haemopoitic and immunostimulant compounds. Some of the plants which are found to be radioprotective are Centella asiatica, Ginkgo biloba, Hippophae rhamnoides, Ocimum sanctum, Podophyllurn hexandrum, Tinospora cordifolia, Emblica officinalis, Phyllanthus amarus, etc. So there is an urgent need to identify and characterize the many of the plants in relation to the radioprotection. Besides these medicinal plants there are also some fruits and vegetables which are having good response against harmful radiations such as Kiwifruit Actinidia deliciosa (Actinidaceae), Cape Gooseberry Physalis peruviana (Solanaceae). They protect against the radiation-induced damage by

The aim of the studies was to determine the level and kind of microbiological contamination of air and surfaces in museum premises with various collection specificities. In addition, the criteria for selecting indicators of contamination with harmful biological agents at museum workposts are proposed. The analysis of microbial contamination was carried out in 14 museum premises (storehouses, restoration workshops, exhibition hall). Microbiological air purity was measured with a MAS-100 Eco Air Sampler. Surface samples were collected using contact plates RODAC Envirocheck. Biochemical API tests were used to identify bacteria and yeasts. Fungi were diagnosed with taxonomic keys, based on macro- and microscopic mycelia assessment. The levels of microbiological contamination in museums varied and ranged from 2.1 x 10(2) to 7.0 x 10(3) cfu/m3 in the air and from 1.4 x 10(2) to 1.7 x 10(4) cfu/100 cm2 on surfaces. The dominant microorganisms were fungi, which accounted respectively for 18-98% and 23-100% of all isolates from tested sites and surfaces. It was found that the amount of fungi in the indoor air of the Museum of Archeology and Ethnography and the Museum of Independence Traditions equaled respectively 4.2 x 10(2) cfu/m3 and 1.4 x 10(4) cfu/m3, which means that they exceeded the recommended reference value of 2.0 x 10(2) cfu/m3. Having analyzed the frequency of strain isolation, the source of microorganisms and the hazard to human health, 10 fungal species were isolated, which may be regarded as indicators of contamination with harmful biological agents at museum workposts. They are: Aspergillus (A. niger, A. versicolor), Cladosporium (C. herbarum, C. macrocarpum), Penicillium (P. carneum, P. digitatum, P. italicum, P. paneum, P. polonicum), Rhizopus nigricans.

We define geoengineering (GE) as the intentional use of technology to change the planet's climate. Many people believe GE is different in kind rather than degree from any other organized activity in human history. In fact, humans caused changes in the planet's climate long before the industrial age, and all organisms engineer their environments directly or indirectly. The relevant difference between this cumulative and generally inadvertent activity and GE is the presence of intention. Now that science has revealed the extent to which humans can change the climate, however, even the continuance of Business as Usual (BAU) is, in effect, a form of intentional GE, albeit one that will cause significant climate harm, defined as effects such as sea level rise that will impact human well-being. But as with all forms of engineering, the devil is in the details: what forms of GE should be tried first? Some methods, such as large-scale afforestation, are low risk but have long-term payoffs; others, such as aerosol injection into the stratosphere, could help buy time in a warming crisis but have unknown side-effects and little long-term future. Climate change is a world-wide, inter-generational tragedy of the commons. Rational choice theory, the spatial and temporal extension of the problem, poorly fitted moral frameworks, and political maneuvering are all factors that inhibit solutions to the climate tragedy of the commons. The longer that such factors are allowed to dominate decision-making (or the lack thereof) the more likely it is that humanity will be forced to resort to riskier and more drastic forms of GE. We argue that this fact brings an additional measure of urgency to the search for ways to engineer the climate differently so as to avoid climate harm in the most lasting and least risky way.

The rapid technological advancement has increased human exposure to ionizing radiations enormously. Ionizing radiations produces deleterious effects in the living organisms. Widespread use of radiation in diagnosis therapy, industry, energy sector and inadvertent exposure during air and space travel, nuclear accidents and nuclear terror attacks requires safeguard against human exposures. Lead shielding and other physical measures can be used in such situations but with difficulty to manage; thus pharmacological intervention could be the most prudent strategy to protect humans against the harmful effect of ionizing radiations. These pharmacological agents are radioprotectives; The development of radioprotective agents has been the subject of intense research in view of their potential for use within a radiation environment. However, no ideal, safe synthetic radio protectors are available to date, so the search for alternative sources including plants has been ongoing. In Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine, several plants have been used to treat free radical-mediated ailments and, therefore, it is logical to expect that such plants may also render some protection against radiation damage. This all is due to antioxidant enzymes, nitroxides, and melatonin, antiemetic, anti-inflammatory. haemopoitic and immunostimulant compounds. Some of the plants which are found to be radioprotective are Centella asiatica, Ginkgo biloba, Hippophae rhamnoides, Ocimum sanctum, Podophyllurn hexandrum, Tinospora cordifolia, Emblica officinalis, Phyllanthus amarus, etc. So there is an urgent need to identify and characterize the many of the plants in relation to the radioprotection. Besides these medicinal plants there are also some fruits and vegetables which are having good response against harmful radiations such as Kiwifruit Actinidia deliciosa (Actinidaceae), Cape Gooseberry Physalis peruviana (Solanaceae). They protect against the radiation-induced damage by

...] Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals With Hearing and Speech Disabilities...; speech-to-speech (STS); pay-per-call (900) calls; types of calls; and equal access to interexchange... of a report, due April 16, 2011, addressing whether it is necessary for the waivers to remain in...

Mostly transforms are used for speech data compressions which are lossy algorithms. Such algorithms are tolerable for speech data compression since the loss in quality is not perceived by the human ear. However the vector quantization (VQ) has a potential to give more data compression maintaining the same quality. In this paper we propose speech data compression algorithm using vector quantization technique. We have used VQ algorithms LBG, KPE and FCG. The results table s...

Full Text Available This paper presents new Czech language two-channel (stereo speech database recorded in car environment. The created database was designed for experiments with speech enhancement for communication purposes and for the study and the design of a robust speech recognition systems. Tools for automated phoneme labelling based on Baum-Welch re-estimation were realised. The noise analysis of the car background environment was done.

This paper presents new Czech language two-channel (stereo) speech database recorded in car environment. The created database was designed for experiments with speech enhancement for communication purposes and for the study and the design of a robust speech recognition systems. Tools for automated phoneme labelling based on Baum-Welch re-estimation were realised. The noise analysis of the car background environment was done.

Many of the items in the “Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing” scale questionnaire [S. Gatehouse and W. Noble, Int. J. Audiol.43, 85–99 (2004)] are concerned with speech understanding in a variety of backgrounds, both speech and nonspeech. To study if this self-report data reflected informational masking, previously collected data on 414 people were analyzed. The lowest scores (greatest difficulties) were found for the two items in which there were two speech targets, with successively ...

Full Text Available The underlying principles of thought patterns as shown in SBY's English Speeches Texts are made because there are different responses from the public, a part of public praise that SBY is a good president, and others claim and criticize him that he is slow (Djalal, 2007: forward page. This title so far has not been investigated. This research was aimed at finding out: the underlying principles of SBY’s thought patterns in his English Speech Texts related to Javanese philosophy. This research is qualitative. The data selected from SBY’s speech Texts were analyzed using semantic and pragmastylistic theory then were related to Javanese philosophy. The findings are the underlying principles of SBY’s thought patterns based on Javanese philosophy manifested in his English Speech Texts are: first is Memayu Hayuning Bawana, Ambrasta dur Hangkara means to reach safety, peace, happiness and well-being of the world and its contents, to keep the world maintained and harmony. Second, Rukun agawe santosa crah agawe bubrah means to build the condition of harmony, and avoid conflict, because conflict can be harmful to both parties. Third, tepa selira means keep thinking not to offend others or lighten the burdens of others, tolerance. Fourth is ana rembug becik dirembug means thru negotiations can avoid conflict and achieve cooperation, safety, peace and prosperity. In sum, the world peace can be reached thru discussions without war, soft powers.

Individuals with music training in early childhood show enhanced processing of musical sounds, an effect that generalizes to speech processing. However, the conclusions drawn from previous studies are limited due to the possible confounds of predisposition and other factors affecting musicians and nonmusicians. We used a randomized design to test the effects of a laboratory-controlled music intervention on young infants' neural processing of music and speech. Nine-month-old infants were randomly assigned to music (intervention) or play (control) activities for 12 sessions. The intervention targeted temporal structure learning using triple meter in music (e.g., waltz), which is difficult for infants, and it incorporated key characteristics of typical infant music classes to maximize learning (e.g., multimodal, social, and repetitive experiences). Controls had similar multimodal, social, repetitive play, but without music. Upon completion, infants' neural processing of temporal structure was tested in both music (tones in triple meter) and speech (foreign syllable structure). Infants' neural processing was quantified by the mismatch response (MMR) measured with a traditional oddball paradigm using magnetoencephalography (MEG). The intervention group exhibited significantly larger MMRs in response to music temporal structure violations in both auditory and prefrontal cortical regions. Identical results were obtained for temporal structure changes in speech. The intervention thus enhanced temporal structure processing not only in music, but also in speech, at 9 mo of age. We argue that the intervention enhanced infants' ability to extract temporal structure information and to predict future events in time, a skill affecting both music and speech processing.

The Lombard effect refers to the phenomenon where talkers automatically increase their level of speech in a noisy environment. While many studies have characterized how the Lombard effect influences different measures of speech production (e.g., F0, spectral tilt, etc.), few have investigated...... the consequences of temporally fluctuating noise. In the present study, 20 talkers produced speech in a variety of noise conditions, including both steady-state and amplitude-modulated white noise. While listening to noise over headphones, talkers produced randomly generated five word sentences. Similar...... of noisy environments and will alter their speech accordingly....

In this paper I argue that one way of explaining what is wrong with hate speech is by critically assessing what kind of freedom free speech involves and, relatedly, what kind of freedom hate speech undermines. More specifically, I argue that the main arguments for freedom of speech (e.g. from truth, from autonomy, and from democracy) rely on a “positive” conception of freedom intended as autonomy and self-mastery (Berlin, 2006), and can only partially help us to understand what is wrong with ...

Analysis of English rhythm in speech produced by children and adults revealed that speech rhythm becomes increasingly more stress-timed as language acquisition progresses. Children reach the adult-like target by 11 to 12 years. The employed speech elicitation paradigm ensured that the sentences produced by adults and children at different ages were comparable in terms of lexical content, segmental composition, and phonotactic complexity. Detected differences between child and adult rhythm and between rhythm in child speech at various ages cannot be attributed to acquisition of phonotactic language features or vocabulary, and indicate the development of language-specific phonetic timing in the course of acquisition.

Feb 26, 2009 ... person of Charles Taylor, given his antecedents. Regardless ..... influence of the reactions of the public on the foreign policy actions of governments. ... tion reacted vehemently to this move, which was viewed as tantamount.

... page: //medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000037.htm Foreign body in the nose To use the sharing features ... in a normal attempt to explore their own bodies. Objects placed in the nose may include food, ...

Foreign Direct Investment in China is one of the most comprehensive studies of FDI in China and provides a remarkable background of information on the evolution of China’s FDI policies over the last 30 years.

Developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) in children is a speech disorder, supposed to have a neurological origin, which is commonly considered to result from particular deficits in speech processing (i.e., phonological planning, motor programming). However, the label DAS has often been used as

Background: The previous literature has largely focused on speech analysis systems and ignored process issues, such as the nature of adequate speech samples, data acquisition, recording and playback. Although there has been recognition of the need for training on tools used in speech analysis associated with cleft palate, little attention has been…

Background: Previous studies have shown that in semi-spontaneous speech, individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia produce relatively many direct speech constructions. It has been claimed that in 'healthy' communication direct speech constructions contribute to the liveliness, and indirectly to